Comment by frik | Hacker News Reader

Comment by frik | Hacker News Reader

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> Yes, a lot of terrible engineering happened during the dotcom boom, and most of it was proprietary code running on old-school Unix servers.

That's not true. Linux was very popular in 1998-2000 already, with RedHat and SuSE distros everywhere. Server software was usually written with CGI api, in C, Perl or PHP. Also Windows NT 4 and 2000 servers with ASP (classic) with web server software written in VBScript or JavaScript (yes, ASP classic had JavaScript/JScript support on server). Well known top websites of dotCom era like EBay and MySpace run on Windows servers back then. Back then Windows was a lot more popular on servers than nowadays. Also old school UNIX wasn't such a popular choice - name me five well known dotCom era startups that run on UNIX (in 1998 to 2001) instead of Linux or Windows.

@downvoter: care to explain?

Solaris was extremely popular in the late 90's through early 2000's. All the startups I worked for personally used Sun hardware. (No big names, they all failed.)

Even Ebay used Solaris for their back end for a time. See https://www.linuxtoday.com/high_performance/2001011200106psh...

Never heard of Sun? And don't forget about all the ColdFusion sites, a few of which are still around

MySpace was ColdFusion, running on dotNet based ColdFusion runtime on Windows servers.

SunOS - which well known dotCom era startups run their web servers on SunOS? (beside Sun) There was also SGI with Irix, etc but beside some graphical niche market, etc. How is this relevant to dotcom?

> SunOS - which well known dotCom era startups run their web servers on SunOS?

Pretty much everybody. Remember those absurd Sun Microsystems ads that claimed "We're the dot in dotcom"? They had $15bn in revenue in 2000; even mighty Microsoft only had $22bn that year.

Linux was so far behind Solaris and the other commercial UNIXes in features and security in 1998-2000 that it wasn't even a blip on the radar.

eBay for one ran on Sun - and then switched to IBM servers around 2002-03

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