Alteon sold a box that sat in front of a website's servers and decided which one should answer each visitor. It called the idea Web-working. Its switches balanced load across servers, steered traffic to caches and firewalls, and kept sessions running when a machine failed. E-commerce shops, portals and hosting companies were its buyers. When Alteon filed to go public in 1999, the web was growing faster than any one server could keep up with.

Research First, Then Switches

Alteon was incorporated in Delaware on March 18, 1996. Through April 1997 it did mostly research and development. Its products combined switches, server adapters and software. One Alteon Web switch could do the work of a regular switch plus several traffic management appliances, at a lower cost. Customers included web portals, content publishers, internet service providers and large companies running their own data centers.

Nineteen Dollars, One Year Public

Alteon priced its IPO at $19 a share in September 1999 and listed on the Nasdaq National Market as ATON. It sold 4 million shares. Demand for web gear was near its peak. In 2000 Nortel Networks, the Canadian telecom equipment maker, agreed to buy Alteon in a stock deal valued at about $7.8 billion. The merger closed that fall, and Alteon stopped reporting as a public company in October 2000.

Cover: The Pilot, from the series "The Camera's Story of Raftman's Life on the Wisconsin", Henry Hamilton Bennett. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for a river pilot steering through rapids (directing web traffic).