Just a Drop in the Bucket (1994)

I used to have microsoft@<isp> as an email address, and would occasionally get complaints about blue screens or other Windows related issues. People did not know how email worked in that time.

Thanks! Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately) the internet has grown up, and it's been a long time since someone has sent bona fide misdirected mail to the site.

I really enjoyed reading those actually.

Some are funny, but it shows how 'trusting' some people are. It seems like mailing is a kind of harmless game (they actually shared addresses with strangers).

I hope/think most people are more cautious nowadays :)

You think? It certainly keeps the low-ball speculators away, but if it were to sell do you really think it would get $10MM?

Imagine being so fortunate in life that you can sit on your website for hundreds of thousands, if not millions, simply because you "like the name". That's life changing money for me.

Yes. I used to live near there. Palo Alto has occasionally struggled with their underground transformer vaults. They make the streets look nice, but they're high maintenance. Many were submerged in the 1998 flood.

The "DEC data center" is of historic importance to the Internet. It's an old telephone company building, and was the home of AltaVista. It's now an Equnix data center, and says "PAIX" (Palo Alto Internet Exchange) on the front. [1]

DEC built the AltaVista search engine as a demo for DEC Alpha 64-bit computers, to show what they could do. Having thousands of identical machines in racks was a new thing then.

Because it was in an old telco building, with high ceilings, high racks, and ceiling cable trays from the electromechanical switching era, AltaVista was built like a telephone central office - tall racks of computers, with the cables overhead. Before this, data centers were usually raised floor construction. This is where telco-like data centers started.

As the "Palo Alto Internet Exchange", around 1996, it was the main peering point for the Internet in Northern California. One of the first big carrier-neutral peering points.

Also, I think the "1MW transformer" for the data center was actually above ground in the alley. It, or a successor, is still there, and you can see it in the aerials, but there's a cinderblock wall in front of it now. It used to be out in the open on a pad.

[1] https://www.google.com/maps/@37.4455915,-122.1611684,3a,31y,...

I really appreciate you and your site. I am in my 30s now and have enjoyed the weirdness of milk.com since I was a teenager. It is really nice to see a pre-web-2.0 / internet classic site still up and running. It's also great to see it on a domain name like 'milk.com' not being owned by a massive company.