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Is this in reference to something that should be linked for those not alive or in the know at the time?

I'm not sure if it was entirely true, but there are stories that after Microsoft bought Hotmail in the mid-90's, they quickly attempted to move them from FreeBSD (?) to Windows NT. But it failed miserably, and they went back to the original stack for another ~decade.

the FreeBSD migration didn’t take that long - iirc this was the frontend migration to an IIS ISAPI.

the Solaris bits (storage and routing tables) took far longer - and again iirc the frontend had been rewritten in C# before all the Sun hardware had been decommissioned.

Ah sounds like you actually might have been there. I'm sure you must have some interesting stories from that time

not in the Hotmail dev team but about as close as you could get otherwise. I even reported to their general manager for a minute or two.

fun times for sure.

Yes. This happened.

Maybe this from 2012 https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2012/aug/01/microsoft...

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