Comment by oscargrouch | Hacker News Reader

Comment by oscargrouch | Hacker News Reader

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I guess you are lacking some context.

Back in the day, you could:

* Be bold enough to use Linux or FreeBSD and use CGI or Perl as the only free version

* Use ASP but pay license fees for Windows NT, ISS and SQL Server

* Use ColdFusion which was kind of trendy but was pretty expensive.

When PHP arrived it was so refreshing. I used to make my stuff in Apache+PHP, MySQL and Linux and it was magical what you could do with very few lines of code.

The worse part was to manually get the sources of the dependencies one by one, hit ./configure and make, so you can compile a php module for Apache

In those days Microsoft was pretty strong, everything used to be closed source and payed and that's why for people who understand what it was back then, this does not sound like the splashy announcements of today.

That's why every time you see Linus, Stallman or any person that was active in the open source movement, you should pay a beer to them. The world of technology owe a lot to them, specially the underdogs.

I remember my employer was paying Indian consultants a fortune to build a web app in ASP that didn't work. I told them I could do it in PHP in a week, but they didn't trust some "free program."

Ha, I can relate to that. Met a potential in the mid-2000s who lived down the road running a travel agency which was falling over due to bugs in its web app. He knew nothing about technology other than that his app needed to parse "an XML" to work properly. "Can you get the XMLs working?". As soon as he showed me a couple of files I realised it was a Classic ASP site written in VBScript running on some overpriced Windows host so I offered to rewrite it in PHP. No chance - in his mind "the XMLs" were glued to the original code.

I didn't even remember this, OMG.. VBScript that used to ship with IE and could be used instead of Javascript.

We are so lucky that Bill Gates missed how important internet would turn out to be..

I've saved a startup once from going bankrupt more or less like this.

They were paying a lot for ASP and a shitty product(cant remember the name..it was something like WebObjects) that was taking too long to load, the newly born company i was hired for would cease to exist, so even thought i was hired as a sysadmin to manage the network, linux and databases, i've used my low skills as a programmer, without nobody asking me, and designed the thing in secret, in about two or three weeks with PHP, Linux and MySql instead.

The (news based, with a lot of personalization page) loaded in about 400 milliseconds instead of what once was a 10 seconds load.

My bosses were a little skeptic at first, because the ASP folks was a team formed with university professors and skilled pros, and i was a teen that was not even hired as a coder. Also it was so much faster that they thought i could only be cheating somehow (like static instead of personalized with data from a backend db)..

Linux and open source was also faced with skepticism, specially when confronted with Microsoft stuff that everybody was used to back then.

The LAMP stack was a wonder back in those days, and it helped a lot to popularize Linux, MySQL, Apache and PHP. I know today PHP doesn't look so cool giving all the other players, but in the context it was launched it was so much better than all the status quo of the nineties where the options were quite limited.

Some poor lost souls are still using ColdFusion. Pity me.

Ha. I am currently consulting on a project that is moving from ColdFusion to PHP.

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