Company originally founded by Philip Greenspun.

User, developer of ACS, the precursor to OpenACS.

Went down in 2001(?), and was bought by RedHat in 2002.

The story of ArsDigita's demise from the view point of:

• Philip Greenspun [1]
• Eve Andersson [2] (removed, archived at [3])
• Michael Yoon [4] (long, specific, sober) (site seems gone since mid-2004, the Internet Archive has the page here: [5])

---

Described in "ArsDigita Makes its Own Choices" [6] (again, missing in action, but the Wayback Machine has it here [7]) and "Catching Up" [8]. (missing in action again, and this time the Internet Archive links at [9] are all giving errors)

---

Observing the need for my privacy, I feel compelled to note that as part of our Java port (we're adding a java application in addition to our existing and complex aolserver application), we have started by writing wrapping functions around JDBC named databaseToList, and databaseToStringOrNull. Those developers who have worked with acs will appreciate that humble nod to the influence of arsdigita's system.

In addition we've long recognized many items that ad was years ahead in; in my opinion it will be years before Java as a web platform will be as easy to modify and extend as the acs system was for aolserver. What's worth noting isn't just the excellent choice of technology, but also the forward-thinking application of concepts like db abstraction, and dynamic programming.

Thanks ad! For what it's worth, you changed the way many developers looked at code.

---