Vendor lineage
Akamai Technologies
Answered a question Tim Berners-Lee posed about congestion, and the answer became most of how the web is delivered.
Akamai was incorporated on 20 August 1998 by Tom Leighton, an MIT professor of applied mathematics, and Danny Lewin, his graduate student, with Jonathan Seelig, Preetish Nijhawan and Randall Kaplan. It began as a response to a challenge Tim Berners-Lee had put to MIT: the web was going to get congested, and somebody should work out what to do about it.
The specific problem was the flash crowd. A site becomes briefly famous, traffic arrives faster than the origin server can answer, and the site falls over precisely when the most people are looking at it. Adding capacity does not help, because the capacity is needed for an hour a year.
Leighton and Lewin's answer was mathematical rather than architectural. Consistent hashing lets a large, changing set of caches agree on which of them holds which object without any of them coordinating - crucially, adding or removing a server only remaps a small fraction of the keys, so the network can grow and lose nodes continuously without churning everything. That algorithm is the reason a distributed cache can be operated at all at scale, and it is used far beyond content delivery today.
The business plan reached the finals of MIT's $50K competition, the company licensed the intellectual property from MIT, and most of the early employees were the students who had worked on it. FreeFlow launched commercially in 1999 with Yahoo as an early customer, and the IPO that year was one of the era's most dramatic: shares opened at $26 and closed the first day above $145.
Danny Lewin was killed on 11 September 2001. He was a passenger on American Airlines Flight 11, the first aircraft flown into the World Trade Center, and is credited with attempting to stop the hijackers - he had served as an officer in the Israeli Defense Forces. He was 31. In 2017 he and Leighton were inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame for the algorithms behind the company.
Akamai has since moved a majority of its revenue away from pure content delivery into security and cloud, buying Prolexic for DDoS mitigation, SOASTA for performance measurement, and Linode to offer compute at the edge rather than only caching. The network is measured in hundreds of thousands of servers across more than a hundred countries.
- Akamai's own company history - incorporation 20 August 1998, the MIT $50K competition, the founding team and the MIT licence
- MIT Alumni Association - Leighton and Lewin in the National Inventors Hall of Fame, and Lewin's death on Flight 11
- Business model history: the Berners-Lee challenge, consistent hashing, FreeFlow, and the 1999 IPO from $26 to over $145