People
Two of the developers of WAIS, Brewster Kahle and Harry Morris, left Thinking Machines to found WAIS Inc in Menlo Park, California with Bruce Gilliat. WAIS Inc. was originally developed as a joint project between Apple Computer, Peat Markwick, Dow Jones, and Thinking Machines. In 1992, the presidential campaign of Ross Perot used WAIS as a campaign wide information system, connecting the field offices to the national office. Later, Perot Systems adopted WAIS to better access the information in its corporate databases. Other early clients were the Environmental Protection Agency, Library of Congress, and the Department of Energy and later the Wall Street Journal and Encyclopædia Britannica.
WAIS Inc was sold to AOL in May 1995 for $15 million. Following the sale, Margaret St. Pierre left WAIS Inc to start Blue Angel Technologies. Her "WAIS variant" formed the basis of MetaStar. Georgios Papadopoulos left to found Atypon. François Schiettecatte left Human Genome Project at Johns Hopkins Hospital and started FS-Consult and developed his own variant of WAIS which eventually became ScienceServer, which was later sold to Elsevier Science. Kahle and Gilliat went on to found the Internet Archive and Alexa Internet.
Read more about this topic: Wide Area Information Server
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