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What you’re describing is so hard to convey to people. In 1994 the we were building raised-floor data centers with halon for suppressors and marveling at our 2G
by edw 7y ago
What you’re describing is so hard to convey to people. In 1994 the we were building raised-floor data centers with halon for suppressors and marveling at our 2GB behemoth UNIX boxes. And writing our own web application framework using CGI. In ‘99 we were renting a suite at a colo and putting our own hardware there, running ColdFusion web apps. In ‘04 we were renting half a rack at the same colo and trying not to write three tier Java servlet based apps with 1,000 line web.xml files. And then AWS happened.
- rbinv 7y agoCGI to ColdFusion to Java servlets. Sounds enterprise-y.
- edw 7y agoIt was all very start-uppy. What were you using to build your commercial web applications in 1996 if not CGI? Mod_perl did not even exist until 1995, and FastCGI didn't exist IIRC until after Netscape released their enterprise server.
- rbinv 7y agoHuh. I agree with CGI, but CF certainly had alternatives.
- edw 7y agoThe boring low-risk unsexy thing that works is often underrated. I didn't choose CF — at the time I argued that it was a tool for scrubs, but the VPE said, "Hey, I know it, and I know it can do the job." We launched that CF-based web site on time and sold the company for $350MM fewer than six months later. Only then did we incrementally port it to Java.