At pioneering online music retailing company CDnow, the servers were named after original Beavis and Butthead characters, like Jodie, Tanq(ueray), Lolitta [sic], McVicker, Daria and Anderson, said Timothy Allen, a Wharton Computing Center staffer who worked at the Fort Washington company from 1998 to 2000.
The photo above, taken by Phillip Pollard, is of the company’s data center in 2000. See what a modern-day data center looks like in our story here.
“It was quite a beauty for its day,” Allen said about that data center in a recent blog post. A senior web developer at the company when he left, he calls CDnow one of the best places he’s ever worked.
CDNow, which was founded in Ambler, is a landmark in the Philadelphia technology narrative.
At its height, CDnow employed nearly 750 people and sold $150 million worth of music every year, said former CDnow CEO and COO Mike Krupit. Hear from Krupit and cofounder Jason Olim about what they learned from running the online music retailer in our story here.
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