Paul Flaherty

Paul Andrew Flaherty ( born March 14, 1964 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, † March 16, 2006 in Belmont, California ) was an American computer scientist and electrical engineer. He was a renowned specialist for internet protocols and was co-developer of the search engine AltaVista.

Career

Paul Flaherty studied in the years 1982-1986 at Marquette University in Milwaukee Electrical Engineering with a minor in mathematics. He completed his bachelor's degree summa cum laude. He then moved to Stanford University in California, where he made in the years 1986 to 1989 his master and doctorate in 1994. His doctoral thesis was on network systems and their performance improvement through traffic analysis. In the years 1986 and 1987 he also worked at AT & T Bell Laboratories.

He moved in 1994 to Digital Equipment Corporation ( DEC), where he developed the AltaVista search engine, which went online in 1997. AltaVista was the late 1990s, before Google took over this role to one of the leading search engines. The search engine brought DEC more than 4.5 billion U.S. dollars. 1999 Flaherty was technical director at AltaVista.

In May 2000 he moved to the small consulting provider Zindigo, where he remained for 15 months. In July 2001, he began working at Accenture, a large consulting company, which he left in February 2003.

His last stop was TALKplus, a small telecommunications company, where he began his career in June 2005. He was vice president of product development and developed the marketing strategy of the company.

Paul Flaherty died at the age of 42 of a heart attack. He is survived by his wife Natasha Margaret Minenko Flaherty, his parents and four brothers. He was buried on 28 March 2006 in Fargo, North Dakota.