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Also, the implementation and infrastructure was a total shit show.

True, its downtimes predated the Twitter fail whale.

Interestingly, the first version used ASP.NET, visible in the .aspx domains, which really deviated from other Google tech.

Yeah, internally it was, uh, an issue.

Just before launch there was a attempt to hide that it was google.

What is (and was) Google tech? I naively thought Google didn't have a praised stack.

Back then it was mostly Java, Python and C++.

They even made a Java-based framework that would generate Javascript, GWT. Orkut was rewritten to use in 2009.

I used to use GWT. It was such a mess to work with, but an interesting mess.

Well it used what was available at the time. Which was not a lot, that it even worked is insane

We still have it running somewhere. Not pretty but zero issues for a largish GUI

But also a highly specific Linux runtime environment, distributed storage, etc.