that was 10 years earlier

i was there...

... when ... was

Not much has changed, the whole contraption still is, to a frightening extent.

> Back when the Internet was quite literally held together with duct tape

No, you'd have to go back further than that.

By the time 4chan came about, the web was starting to crystalize into platforms, and standard tools and databases had been developed. Design and UX was starting to be important.

At the time of launch, I distinctly remember that my classmates thought 4chan was weird for taking after "primitive" Japanese image boards. (Craigslist, too, was considered dated.)

The early "duct tape" days were the era of EzBoard (1996; before phpBB, vBulletin, and Invision), Flash (1993), Geocities (1994), Angelfire (1996), Lycos (1994), Dogpile (1996), ICQ (1996), early AOL Instant Messenger (1997; before Trillian, Gaim, Libpurple), lots of little IRC clients... lots of CGI, Perl, and C all slapped together. That's when flat file databases were a norm, not an exception.

4chan came around the same time as Digg and Reddit, and in response to some of the platformization that was already starting to happen (Xanga, LiveJournal, and Blogger in ~1999). The machinery and practice of modern web engineering was already falling into place.

I can't find it right now, but there is a well-known photograph of the servers hosting `ibm.com` in, I think, 1997. It's basically a bunch of tower PCs stacked haphazardly sideways on each other.

true- '4chan runs on a cluster of mac minis' is a claim just silly enough to be acceptable without evidence

Reminds me of mysql connection error coincidentally happening with every get. I'm implying moot stole it.