ArsDigita, LLC, was a web development company founded in
Cambridge, Massachusetts
Cambridge ( ) is a city in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States. As part of the Boston metropolitan area, the cities population of the 2020 U.S. census was 118,403, making it the fourth most populous city in the state, behind Boston ...
in 1997. The company produced a popular
open source toolkit, the
ArsDigita Community System (ACS), for building database-backed community websites, and flourished at the peak of the
dot-com bubble
The dot-com bubble (dot-com boom, tech bubble, or the Internet bubble) was a stock market bubble in the late 1990s, a period of massive growth in the use and adoption of the Internet.
Between 1995 and its peak in March 2000, the Nasdaq Compo ...
. ACS was also the roots of
OpenACS
The ArsDigita Community System (ACS) was an open source toolkit for developing community web applications developed primarily by developers associated with ArsDigita Corporation. It was licensed under the terms of the GNU GPL, and is one of the mos ...
, which added
PostgreSQL as a database option and gave the system a fully open-source stack.
History
Foundation
![Ferrari F355 in front of the ArsDigita offices taken by Hans Masing in July 2000](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a2/Ferrari_F355_in_front_of_the_ArsDigita_offices_taken_by_Hans_Masing_in_July_2000.jpg)
ArsDigita was founded by
Philip Greenspun
Philip Greenspun (born September 28, 1963) is an American computer scientist, educator, early Internet entrepreneur, and pilot who was a pioneer in developing online communities like photo.net.
Biography
Greenspun was born on September 28, 1 ...
, Tracy Adams, Ben Adida, Eve Andersson, Olin Shivers, Aurelius Prochazka, and Jin Choi. Recruitment for the company was touted heavily by Greenspun, and ArsDigita became notorious among the "elite geeks" as a place where recruiting could result in significant payoffs. During the spring of 1999, for example, recruiting 5 hires would earn the employee a
Honda S2000
The Honda S2000 is an open top sports car that was manufactured by Japanese automobile manufacturer Honda, from 1999 until 2009. First shown as a concept car called the SSM at the Tokyo Motor Show in 1995, the production version was launched on ...
. Recruiting 10 employees would net a
Ferrari F355
The Ferrari F355 (Type F129) is a sports car manufactured by Italian car manufacturer Ferrari produced from May 1994 until 1999. The car is a heavily revised Ferrari 348 with notable exterior and performance changes. The F355 was succeeded by th ...
. A trophy
F355 in bright yellow was kept parked outside of the Prospect Street office in Cambridge to entice employees into recruiting. Later in the summer of 1999, as new management was brought on board, the policy was quietly changed to a lease of the cars, not outright ownership.
[ ]
ArsDigita Foundation and ArsDigita University
The founders set up a nonprofit organization, the ArsDigita Foundation, which sponsored the ArsDigita Prize, a programming contest for high-school students held in 1999, 2000, and 2001.
In 2000, a free intensive one-year post-baccalaureate program in
computer science
Computer science is the study of computation, automation, and information. Computer science spans theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, information theory, and automation) to practical disciplines (includi ...
was announced, called ArsDigita University. It was based on the
undergraduate
Undergraduate education is education conducted after secondary education and before postgraduate education. It typically includes all postsecondary programs up to the level of a bachelor's degree. For example, in the United States, an entry-le ...
course of study at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the ...
(MIT) and financed and supported by the ArsDigita Foundation. The majority of the instructors were professors from MIT and the program was tuition free.
Potential recruits were required to submit solutions to a handful of
problem set A problem set, sometimes shortened as pset, is a teaching tool used by many universities. Most courses in physics, math, engineering, chemistry, and computer science will give problem sets on a regular basis. They can also appear in other subjects, ...
s used in an Internet application development course at MIT. Some of these problem sets required the use of the
Oracle object-relational database management system behind Web pages. Others were basic
computer science
Computer science is the study of computation, automation, and information. Computer science spans theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, information theory, and automation) to practical disciplines (includi ...
problems such as computing a
Fibonacci series
In mathematics, the Fibonacci numbers, commonly denoted , form a sequence, the Fibonacci sequence, in which each number is the sum of the two preceding ones. The sequence commonly starts from 0 and 1, although some authors start the sequence from ...
recursively
Recursion (adjective: ''recursive'') occurs when a thing is defined in terms of itself or of its type. Recursion is used in a variety of disciplines ranging from linguistics to logic. The most common application of recursion is in mathematics ...
using the
Tcl
TCL or Tcl or TCLs may refer to:
Business
* TCL Technology, a Chinese consumer electronics and appliance company
**TCL Electronics, a subsidiary of TCL Technology
* Texas Collegiate League, a collegiate baseball league
* Trade Centre Limited ...
programming language.
After running from September 2000 through July 2001, seeing the first class to graduation, the dissolution of the ArsDigita Foundation forced the program to shut down. Most of the course lectures were videotaped. The tapes and other course materials are available free under the
Open Content License from aduni.org, a website maintained by the alumni of the university. That site exists to carry on the school's mission of supplying free education, and streams ~150GB/month of lectures to thousands of people around the world. A 4-DVD set containing the videos and course materials (
problem set A problem set, sometimes shortened as pset, is a teaching tool used by many universities. Most courses in physics, math, engineering, chemistry, and computer science will give problem sets on a regular basis. They can also appear in other subjects, ...
s, exams, solution sets, and course notes) is also available for a fee. The tapes were made available on Google Video in 2008 allowing easier and more flexible access.
Former instructor
Holly Yanco
Holly Ann Yanco is an American roboticist and computer scientist who works as Distinguished University Professor of computer science at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, and the director of the New England Robotics Validation and Experiment ...
became a
University of Massachusetts Lowell
The University of Massachusetts Lowell (UMass Lowell and UML) is a public research university in Lowell, Massachusetts, with a satellite campus in Haverhill, Massachusetts. It is the northernmost member of the University of Massachusetts public ...
computer science professor and was named a 2013 Woman to Watch.
Dissolution
Approximately 180 ArsDigita employees were hired at the company's peak, but with the
crash of the dot-com economy, many of ArsDigita's clients went out of business. Others cut back heavily on their technology initiatives. The weight of payroll and offices in
Cambridge
Cambridge ( ) is a College town, university city and the county town in Cambridgeshire, England. It is located on the River Cam approximately north of London. As of the 2021 United Kingdom census, the population of Cambridge was 145,700. Cam ...
,
Berkeley, California
Berkeley ( ) is a city on the eastern shore of San Francisco Bay in northern Alameda County, California, United States. It is named after the 18th-century Irish bishop and philosopher George Berkeley. It borders the cities of Oakland and E ...
, Washington D.C., and
Ann Arbor, Michigan soon overwhelmed the company. The Ann Arbor office was closed in September, 2000, with the other offices following over the next few months.
ArsDigita took $38 million in
venture capital
Venture capital (often abbreviated as VC) is a form of private equity financing that is provided by venture capital firms or funds to start-up company, startups, early-stage, and emerging companies that have been deemed to have high growth poten ...
investment from
Greylock and
General Atlantic
General Atlantic (also known as "GA") is an American growth equity firm providing capital and strategic support for global growth companies, headquartered in New York, United States. The firm was founded in 1980 as the captive investment team for ...
in 2000 to provide working capital for expansion of its product line. Greenspun said
[ the venture capitalists staged an internal coup to drive the founders out of the management structure and installed incompetent professional managers with little idea of how to run a software products company, resulting in the collapse of the company and a lawsuit between the founding shareholders and the venture capitalists over control of management. Michael Yoon, who was an ArsDigita employee at the time, said ArsDigita had other management problems as well. The lawsuit was settled out of court with Greenspun receiving $7.6M.
In 2002, ArsDigita's main assets (including the pinball machine and several pieces of artwork) were acquired by Red Hat.]
References
External links
; General
* {{webarchive, url=https://web.archive.org/web/19980114030856/http://www.arsdigita.com/, title=Official website
OpenACS, the actively developed open-source version of the ACS
; ArsDigita University
aduni.org
alumni Website
Description of a visit
by Aaron Swartz
Aaron Hillel Swartz (November 8, 1986 – January 11, 2013) was an American computer programmer, entrepreneur, writer, political organizer, and Internet hacktivist. A prolific programmer, Swartz helped develop the web feed format RSS, the tech ...
"All About ArsDigita University"
a page about the school by an alumnus
"Communications of the ACM"
article by ADU director Shai Simonson
Mirror
of ArsDigita University courseware
Educational software is a term used for any computer software which is made for an educational purpose. It encompasses different ranges from language learning software to classroom management software to reference software. The purpose of all t ...
at the Internet Archive
The Internet Archive is an American digital library with the stated mission of "universal access to all knowledge". It provides free public access to collections of digitized materials, including websites, software applications/games, music, ...
Companies based in Cambridge, Massachusetts
Companies disestablished in 2002
Defunct companies based in Massachusetts
Defunct software companies of the United States
Red Hat