ArsDigita: From Start-Up to Bust-Up

There are various alternative accounts of ArsDigita's history on the web from people who worked there. Here's one: http://michael.yoon.org/arsdigita

In a nutshell, Yoon claims that Philip Greenspun played a significant part in his own company's downfall.

1. [2001]

2. What he's up to these days: http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/

3. One specific is helping with patent litigation (see comments at http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/2011/08/16/anyone-have-a-...)

The remnants of ArsDigita were acquired in the end by Red Hat. For a time the (Java rewrite of) ACS was sold to a few places, but I don't think it is active today.

I consulted on ACS/Java for about 6 months. It was a great example of the Second System Effect. Incredibly over-engineered. Slow. Baroque. Obscure.

Wikipedia says of the Second System Effect "tendency [..] to have elephantine, feature-laden monstrosities as their successors". Whoever wrote that must have been thinking of ACS/Java.

I heard about these guys after seeing this site:

http://aduni.org/

Learned lots of useful things for my theory of computation class.

For those interested, there's another account of the ArsDigita story via interviews with Phillip Greenspun in Jessica Livington's Founders at Work.