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I was webmaster for this site (and thousands of others at WB) back in 2001! I believe this was when we did the great www -> www2 migration, which was of course

I was webmaster for this site (and thousands of others at WB) back in 2001! I believe this was when we did the great www -> www2 migration, which was of course supposed to be temporary. In fact I think that was when we migrated from our own datacentre to AOL's but I could be getting the timing wrong. Back then it was served from a Sun E4500 running Solaris (7?) and Netscape Enterprise Server. Netscape had been acquired by AOL which had also just bought Time Warner (that's why we moved to their datacentre) but somehow we couldn't make the internal accounting work and still had to buy server licenses. Fun fact, unlike Apache, NES enabled the HTTP DELETE method out of the box and it had to be disabled in your config. We found that out the hard way when one of the sysadmins ran a vulnerability scanner which deleted all the websites. We were forbidden from running scans again by management. Another fun fact about NES - they were really pushing server side Javascript as the development language for the web (and mostly losing to mod_perl). Also back in 2001 but at a different place I worked with the person who had just written a book on server side js for O'Reilly - he got his advance but they didn't publish it because by the time he had finished it they considered it a "dead technology". Our job was basically to maintain an enormous config file for the webserver which was 99% redirects because they would buy every conceivable domain name for a movie which would all redirect to the canonical one. Famously they couldn't get a hold of matrix.com and had to use whatisthematrix.com. Us sysadmins ran our own IRC server and "302" was shorthand for "let's go" - "302 to a meeting". "302" on its own was "lunchtime". I still mention maintaining this site on my CV and LinkedIn - disappointingly I've never been asked about it in an interview. I suspect most of the people doing the interviewing these days are too young to remember it.

donut 6y ago
> the person who had just written a book on server side js for O'Reilly I'd love to see this unpublished book, if possible!
- ngcc_hk 6y ago
  It will be great!
- mprovost 6y ago
  Unfortunately I can't even remember the author's last name and LinkedIn isn't helping. Let me ask around.
- jacobush 6y ago
  It would sell now like hot cakes. An interesting artefact
  - dmix 6y ago
    OReilly's Javascript books from circa 2001: https://www.oreilly.com/search/?query=server%20side%20javascript&extended_publisher_data=true&highlight=true&include_assessments=false&include_case_studies=true&include_courses=true&include_orioles=true&include_playlists=true&include_collections=true&include_notebooks=true&is_academic_institution_account=false&source=user&topics=JavaScript&sort=publication_date&facet_json=true&page=17&include_scenarios=true https://www.oreilly.com/search/?query=server%20side%20javasc... Plus a few more from 2001: https://www.amazon.com/Server-Side-JavaScript-Developing-Integrated-Applications/dp/020143329X https://www.amazon.com/Server-Side-JavaScript-Developing-Int... https://www.amazon.com/Server-Side-Javascript-Developing-Integrated-Applications/dp/0201616246 https://www.amazon.com/Server-Side-Javascript-Developing-Int... Netscape's 1998 Server Side Javascript guide: https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19957-01/816-6411-10/816-6411-10.pdf https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19957-01/816-6411-10/816-6411-10...
jameshush 6y ago
:) This made my day. Were you based in LA at the time? I’m out in LA now and love hearing stories like this from colleagues who’ve done engineering work in the entertainment industry.
- mprovost 6y ago
  Yes, Burbank. Here's another one - Solaris had a 2GB file size limit (this was before ZFS). Which isn't as crazy as it sounds now - hard drives were 9GB at the time. So ordinarily this wasn't a problem, but when the first Harry Potter movie came out, harrypotter.com (which was being served off the same server as spacejam.com) was the most popular website on the internet and the web server log would hit the 2GB limit every couple hours and we would have to frantically move it somewhere and restart the process.
  - oaiey 6y ago
    And somewhere was /dev/null ?
    - mprovost 6y ago
      Most likely the main Oracle server which had a disk array attached. These days it's easy to forget how tricky it could be to get basic things like this working. rsync was in its infancy and I doubt we were using it. As I recall most servers didn't have ssh installed; telnet was standard. Lots of tar piped over rsh to get files from A to B.
      - ciceryadam 6y ago
        7-8 years ago I've encountered a full-on rsh internal network in a fairly big datacenter. No rsync, rcp. It turned out that the sysadmins were too lazy to set up ssh keys on all the servers, and their manager was skilled at deflecting issues.
  - 101008 6y ago
    Hello, I run a monthly magazine about Harry Potter, could I interview you about this? Any email address where I could write to you? Thanks!
systemvoltage 6y ago
Made my day too! Wow. I like how it loads instanly! :-) I remember staring at this thing for about 2 mins watching it load over dial up in a third world country on an laptop dad somehow smuggled into the country from dubai without paying import duties. Yeah.
- michaelbrooks 6y ago
  97 on mobile and 99 on desktop. [0] For a site that never had pagespeed as a tool, that is super impressive and just goes to show how bloated today's websites really are. [0] https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.spacejam.com%2F&tab=desktop https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=...
  - Cthulhu_ 6y ago
    I like to think you can still make a fast site by sticking to the basics; write plain static HTML and CSS, avoid JS, craft your images specifically for the site, and put it behind a decent webserver with compression enabled. I'm sure Pagespeed rewards HTTPS and HTTP/2 support as well but that's webserver config.
    - collinmanderson 6y ago
      Or make it even faster by not using CSS at all! (spacejam.com predates CSS1)
  - neurostimulant 6y ago
    Even gzipped jquery is already larger than the entire payload of the homepage, and jquery is already considered an old technology.
newshorts 6y ago
Server side JavaScript? That’ll never catch. I love these examples of historical calls made too early...
- zakki 6y ago
  But node js is alive now.
  - cpach 6y ago
    He was being sarcastic :)
  - pferdone 6y ago
    Whooooosh
  - trengorilla 6y ago
    Read past sentence 1...
- rbanffy 6y ago
  Having done it NES-style, I'm kind of glad that server-side JS didn't catch. Node is an unlikely event. It hit the sweet spot precisely when async started being needed, there was a runtime environment that made it viable (v8, thanks to massive investment by Google on Chrome), and a language that made it kind of natural.
  - swyx 6y ago
    is there consensus on whether Node did or did not "catch"? like, sure, it was a launch language of AWS Lambda and Netflix uses it heavily. but every backend person I know uses Go or Python or Ruby, anything other than JS. pretty much only fullstack JS people consistently pick nodejs as first choice - but that's just my POV. I'd love some more definitive numbers.
    - rbanffy 6y ago
      Its components are part of every developer's toolbox (a lot of really essential command line tools use to be installed with npm). I don't see many backends powered by it, but I'm mostly a Python developer and that certainly biases my samples.
combatentropy 6y ago
Wow, every paragraph has a great story!
nstj 6y ago
This is a wonderful post. Thanks for your insight.
laputan_machine 6y ago
Thanks for sharing this -- I love stories like these
ralphael 6y ago
thanks for sharing mate, great to know what was going on behind the scenes during this time.
lenartowski 6y ago
Thanks for sharing. Is this your comment in html code? 
- iagovar 6y ago
   1996 site.
janpot 6y ago
> We were forbidden from running scans again by management. A scan detects a severe vulnerability and their reaction is to never run scans again...
- dragonwriter 6y ago
  Well, the issue seems to be the scan not only detected but realized the risk from the vulnerability, which is exactly what is the point of scans to help you avoid.
  - ethbro 6y ago
    It's hard to detect what HTTP DELETE does without, well...
  - chasd00 6y ago
    did they turn the scan loose on PROD without scanning a dev first? granted, I wouldn't blame anyone for assuming a scan is read-only
    - mprovost 6y ago
      A what first?
    - beckingz 6y ago
      What dev? Real software engineers ssh directly into PROD to write code.
    - hnlmorg 6y ago
      It was a different era. A lot of best practices we take for granted now as being common sense were stuff we (and I say this as myself also being an old time sysadmin) had to first learn...and often the hard way. Plus the web wasn't as important business stratergy back then as it obviously is now. I doubt Warner Brothers would have been willing to invest in replica dev infrastructure when "developers can write code on their desktops". I know dev infrastructure is for more than just developing code, but common concepts we take for granted like IaC, CI/CD, config management etc wasn't formalised or widely used back then and servers were pets that were held together with duct tape and sacred rituals. In many ways, that's what made being a sysadmin in that era fun. There wasn't any shame in hacking together a solution.
Deestan 6y ago
They might give you a call now, as the site just died from traffic.
- ramraj07 6y ago
  Which is weird - this site comes up on reddits front-page often and it has never gone down. Is HN higher traffic??
  - trengorilla 6y ago
    Obviously not.
digitaltrees 6y ago
Posts like this make HN amazing. Thanks.
sradman 6y ago
> they were really pushing server side Javascript as the development language for the web (and mostly losing to mod_perl). Enterprise server-side JavaScript was the first stage of dynamic web servers that connected to relational databases. Netscape LiveWire, Sybase PowerDynamo, and Microsoft Active Server Pages (with interpreted LiveScript or VBScript) were early. The enterprise software industry switched to three tiered app server architectures with JVM/.net bytecode runtimes. Single-process, multi-threaded app/web servers were a novelty and none of the client drivers for the popular relational databases were thread safe initially. It took some time for RESTful architectures to shake-out.
- mprovost 6y ago
  Apache (and mod_perl) was thread safe by being multi-process, single threaded. You were always limited by how many perl interpreters could fit in RAM simultaneously. Then came the era of the Java app server (Weblogic and WebSphere). Everyone has mostly forgotten AOLserver (and TCL!). Almost everyone of that generation was influenced to use a RDBMS as a backend by Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing which came out in 1998.[0] Although I never actually met anyone who used AOLserver itself! Everyone took the idea and implemented it in ASP or perl, until the world succumbed to EJBs. [0] https://philip.greenspun.com/panda/ https://philip.greenspun.com/panda/
  - djweis 6y ago
    AOLserver was a joy. I was able to speak about it at the O'Reilly OSCON in 2000 or so.
  - kwoff 6y ago
    I used AOLserver with OpenACS, https://openacs.org/ https://openacs.org/ . AOLserver was apparently more optimized than Apache (at the time, at least). My manager even had us (early 2000s) take a one-week(?) bootcamp at Ars Digita HQ in Boston. Though about the only thing I remember from it was the fancy aeron chairs.
  - silverbacknet 6y ago
    That was also the era when DBMS locking was iffy, so competing inserts/updates would happen once sites got too busy, and everyone was encouraged to turn off transactions (or, on MySQL, just use MyISAM instead of InnoDB) and put it on XFS or even tempfs for speed. So many websites I remember came back up with "the last two weeks of posts are gone, sorry" or just shut down for good because it was all too corrupted to fix, and so were the backups, if they had any.
palad1n 6y ago
Funny you mentioned matrix.com; back between Matrix 1 and Matrix Reloaded I knew someone who knew the guy who owned thematrix.com and apparently was not offered enough to sell it. I guess they must have agreed at some point because I also recall that the matrix.com at around the time of Reloaded then started to redirect to the canonical Matrix site (which it sort of does now). Wonder what the price turned out to be.
- bartread 6y ago
  > matrix.com at around the time of Reloaded then started to redirect to the canonical Matrix site (which it sort of does now) Actually matrix.com now appears to be a site relating to hairstyling and haircare products.
  - smolder 6y ago
    I think they meant thematrix.com which forwards to a WB site; maybe autocorrect added the space.
    - palad1n 6y ago
      Yes, that is the case. Autocorrect strikes again.
lmilcin 6y ago
"We were forbidden from running scans again by management" Seems like management believes it is better to wait for real bad actor to purposefully destroy your site than have it done by your honest employees by accident. I know security in 2001 was much more lax (I started in 2000) but this still shows ignorance of management. The right way to handle this would be to ask your staff to ensure it is possible to restore services and to ensure you know what the tests are doing before you run them.
- EthanHeilman 6y ago
  >Seems like management believes it is better to wait for real bad actor to purposefully destroy your site than have it done by your honest employees by accident. From a politics standpoint that is completely true. Which would you rather tell your boss: Q: Why is the website offline? A: One of our sys admins accidentally deleted it. OR Q: Why is the website offline? A: Some nation-state/teenager launched a sophisticated cyber attack, we need to increase the cybersecurity budget. It's the wildwest out there!
  - lmilcin 6y ago
    There is this saying that only a person that does absolutely nothing never makes any mistakes. Mistakes are normal course of action at a corporation. Sane managers will understand that is not possible to not have people make any mistakes. Mistakes are part of the learning process. Now, when somebody makes a mistake what I am looking for are: Does this person show good judgment? Were precautions taken by the person reasonable? Does the mistake show pattern of abnormality? Some people seem to attract failure, maybe there is some underlying cause? Is the person learning from mistakes? Learning is expensive, if somebody made an expensive mistake I want as much learning as possible for the expense. Is there some kind of external factor that made the mistake possible or more likely? Usually it is possible to improve the environment to reduce the number of mistakes. As to preventing these guys from scanning ever again, that is bad decision because it is likely they would never make the same mistake again. What's done is done. The scan showed there are problems with the app, now we should want to know if there are more problems but without risking the application stability (too much). --- -- Do you know what the Big Co. pays when they pay high salary for an experienced engineer? -- They pay for all the mistakes he/she made at her previous place.
steverit 6y ago
> I still mention maintaining this site on my CV and LinkedIn - disappointingly I've never been asked about it in an interview. I suspect most of the people doing the interviewing these days are too young to remember it. This is astonishing to me. I check back to see if this site is still up once every year or two just to have a smile. If you were sitting across from me in an interview I am quite sure I'd lose all pretense of professionalism and ask you about nothing else for the hour.
- slg 6y ago
  >This is astonishing to me. I check back to see if this site is still up once every year or two just to have a smile. The only reason I am sad about the death of flash is that it has all but killed my version of this: zombo.com.
  - subpar 6y ago
    wow, what a way to learn that zombo is dead. RIP zombocom
    - slg 6y ago
      It isn't quite dead yet. It is just entirely Flash based so it likely won't make it to 2021. Safari has already blocked Flash completely while the other major browsers require you to manually enable it. Odds are those too will begin blocking Flash completely sometime in the next few months with Adobe set to end official support at the end of the year. So maybe add zombo.com to your Chrome whitelist and visit it one more time, because soon the infinite won't be possible.
  - GauntletWizard 6y ago
    https://html5zombo.com/ https://html5zombo.com/ might assuage your grief a bit.
    - slg 6y ago
      Thanks. This like that old trope of a child's pet fish dying and the parents buy a nearly identical fish to swap it in and pretend nothing happened.
acheron 6y ago
> Another fun fact about NES - they were really pushing server side Javascript as the development language for the web I started “web stuff” with Apache and Perl CGI, and I knew NES existed but never used or saw it myself. I had no idea “server side JavaScript” was a thing back then. That’s hilarious.
- mywittyname 6y ago
  I entered around the time LAMP took over and the old-timers would always trash on server-side javascript.
  - acheron 6y ago
    > the old-timers would always trash on server-side javascript. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
SmokeyHamster 6y ago
>the person who had just written a book on server side js for O'Reilly - he got his advance but they didn't publish it because by the time he had finished it they considered it a "dead technology". Makes sense. This server-side Javascript thing will never take off. The Internet in general is really just a passing fad!
mindentropy 6y ago
What machine is this being hosted now? Is it the same Solaris machine?
- mprovost 6y ago
  Your comment made me remember netcraft.com which was the tool we always used to see which web server and OS was running a site. There was a running joke back in the day on slashdot about "BSD is dying" as Linux started to take over, based around Netcraft which used to publish a report showing which servers were most popular. I'm glad to see they haven't changed their logo in 20 years! Their site report used to show an entire history so you could see every time they changed servers but it doesn't look like it does anymore. Now it's running in AWS so certainly not the same Solaris server. Although those E4500s were built like tanks so it could be plugged in somewhere... https://sitereport.netcraft.com/?url=https://www.spacejam.com&refresh=1# https://sitereport.netcraft.com/?url=https://www.spacejam.co...
  - mindentropy 6y ago
    > here was a running joke back in the day on slashdot about "BSD is dying" Lol. I used to read Slashdot when I was in college and that time the running joke was "Had Netcraft confirmed it?", right? > Now it's running in AWS so certainly not the same Solaris server. Hmm. Would they have maintained the site to run on modern software stack or would they have just used legacy emulator like this: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/apn/re-hosting-sparc-alpha-or-other-legacy-systems-to-aws-with-stromasys/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/apn/re-hosting-sparc-alpha-or-o...
lucasverra 6y ago
I used this site as teaching Material for young adults the concept of A Webpage that is not an app. Also Space jam has « style » to be compared to « wikipedia » that is « pure html text »
olingern 6y ago
I submitted this and thought, "this is neat." Didn't expect to return to it being on the front-page nor the former webmaster to show up. The internet is a fun place. That background story is fascinating. I wonder how many full-circles server side JavaScript has made up until now.
klyrs 6y ago
> Fun fact, unlike Apache, NES enabled the HTTP DELETE method out of the box and it had to be disabled in your config. We found that out the hard way when one of the sysadmins ran a vulnerability scanner which deleted all the websites. We were forbidden from running scans again by management. Oh man, the early days were so exciting. Like that time I told my boss not to use Alexa on our admin page out of general paranoia... and a few days later a bunch of content got deleted from our mainpage because they spidered a bunch of [delete] links. I learned my lesson; secured the admin site a lil better and upgraded to delete buttons. Boss kept on using Alexa on the admin page tho.
carldaddy 6y ago
Thanks for the story! Also, I wish 'webmaster' was still a title used in the industry.

donut 6y ago

> the person who had just written a book on server side js for O'Reilly I'd love to see this unpublished book, if possible!

ngcc_hk 6y ago
It will be great!
mprovost 6y ago
Unfortunately I can't even remember the author's last name and LinkedIn isn't helping. Let me ask around.
jacobush 6y ago
It would sell now like hot cakes. An interesting artefact
- dmix 6y ago
  OReilly's Javascript books from circa 2001: https://www.oreilly.com/search/?query=server%20side%20javascript&extended_publisher_data=true&highlight=true&include_assessments=false&include_case_studies=true&include_courses=true&include_orioles=true&include_playlists=true&include_collections=true&include_notebooks=true&is_academic_institution_account=false&source=user&topics=JavaScript&sort=publication_date&facet_json=true&page=17&include_scenarios=true https://www.oreilly.com/search/?query=server%20side%20javasc... Plus a few more from 2001: https://www.amazon.com/Server-Side-JavaScript-Developing-Integrated-Applications/dp/020143329X https://www.amazon.com/Server-Side-JavaScript-Developing-Int... https://www.amazon.com/Server-Side-Javascript-Developing-Integrated-Applications/dp/0201616246 https://www.amazon.com/Server-Side-Javascript-Developing-Int... Netscape's 1998 Server Side Javascript guide: https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19957-01/816-6411-10/816-6411-10.pdf https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19957-01/816-6411-10/816-6411-10...

jameshush 6y ago

:) This made my day. Were you based in LA at the time? I’m out in LA now and love hearing stories like this from colleagues who’ve done engineering work in the entertainment industry.

mprovost 6y ago
Yes, Burbank. Here's another one - Solaris had a 2GB file size limit (this was before ZFS). Which isn't as crazy as it sounds now - hard drives were 9GB at the time. So ordinarily this wasn't a problem, but when the first Harry Potter movie came out, harrypotter.com (which was being served off the same server as spacejam.com) was the most popular website on the internet and the web server log would hit the 2GB limit every couple hours and we would have to frantically move it somewhere and restart the process.
- oaiey 6y ago
  And somewhere was /dev/null ?
  - mprovost 6y ago
    Most likely the main Oracle server which had a disk array attached. These days it's easy to forget how tricky it could be to get basic things like this working. rsync was in its infancy and I doubt we were using it. As I recall most servers didn't have ssh installed; telnet was standard. Lots of tar piped over rsh to get files from A to B.
    - ciceryadam 6y ago
      7-8 years ago I've encountered a full-on rsh internal network in a fairly big datacenter. No rsync, rcp. It turned out that the sysadmins were too lazy to set up ssh keys on all the servers, and their manager was skilled at deflecting issues.
- 101008 6y ago
  Hello, I run a monthly magazine about Harry Potter, could I interview you about this? Any email address where I could write to you? Thanks!

systemvoltage 6y ago

Made my day too! Wow. I like how it loads instanly! :-) I remember staring at this thing for about 2 mins watching it load over dial up in a third world country on an laptop dad somehow smuggled into the country from dubai without paying import duties. Yeah.

michaelbrooks 6y ago
97 on mobile and 99 on desktop. [0] For a site that never had pagespeed as a tool, that is super impressive and just goes to show how bloated today's websites really are. [0] https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.spacejam.com%2F&tab=desktop https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=...
- Cthulhu_ 6y ago
  I like to think you can still make a fast site by sticking to the basics; write plain static HTML and CSS, avoid JS, craft your images specifically for the site, and put it behind a decent webserver with compression enabled. I'm sure Pagespeed rewards HTTPS and HTTP/2 support as well but that's webserver config.
  - collinmanderson 6y ago
    Or make it even faster by not using CSS at all! (spacejam.com predates CSS1)
- neurostimulant 6y ago
  Even gzipped jquery is already larger than the entire payload of the homepage, and jquery is already considered an old technology.

newshorts 6y ago

Server side JavaScript? That’ll never catch. I love these examples of historical calls made too early...

zakki 6y ago
But node js is alive now.
- cpach 6y ago
  He was being sarcastic :)
- pferdone 6y ago
  Whooooosh
- trengorilla 6y ago
  Read past sentence 1...
rbanffy 6y ago
Having done it NES-style, I'm kind of glad that server-side JS didn't catch. Node is an unlikely event. It hit the sweet spot precisely when async started being needed, there was a runtime environment that made it viable (v8, thanks to massive investment by Google on Chrome), and a language that made it kind of natural.
- swyx 6y ago
  is there consensus on whether Node did or did not "catch"? like, sure, it was a launch language of AWS Lambda and Netflix uses it heavily. but every backend person I know uses Go or Python or Ruby, anything other than JS. pretty much only fullstack JS people consistently pick nodejs as first choice - but that's just my POV. I'd love some more definitive numbers.
  - rbanffy 6y ago
    Its components are part of every developer's toolbox (a lot of really essential command line tools use to be installed with npm). I don't see many backends powered by it, but I'm mostly a Python developer and that certainly biases my samples.

combatentropy 6y ago

Wow, every paragraph has a great story!

nstj 6y ago

This is a wonderful post. Thanks for your insight.

laputan_machine 6y ago

Thanks for sharing this -- I love stories like these

ralphael 6y ago

thanks for sharing mate, great to know what was going on behind the scenes during this time.

lenartowski 6y ago

Thanks for sharing. Is this your comment in html code?

iagovar 6y ago
 1996 site.

janpot 6y ago

> We were forbidden from running scans again by management. A scan detects a severe vulnerability and their reaction is to never run scans again...

dragonwriter 6y ago
Well, the issue seems to be the scan not only detected but realized the risk from the vulnerability, which is exactly what is the point of scans to help you avoid.
- ethbro 6y ago
  It's hard to detect what HTTP DELETE does without, well...
- chasd00 6y ago
  did they turn the scan loose on PROD without scanning a dev first? granted, I wouldn't blame anyone for assuming a scan is read-only
  - mprovost 6y ago
    A what first?
  - beckingz 6y ago
    What dev? Real software engineers ssh directly into PROD to write code.
  - hnlmorg 6y ago
    It was a different era. A lot of best practices we take for granted now as being common sense were stuff we (and I say this as myself also being an old time sysadmin) had to first learn...and often the hard way. Plus the web wasn't as important business stratergy back then as it obviously is now. I doubt Warner Brothers would have been willing to invest in replica dev infrastructure when "developers can write code on their desktops". I know dev infrastructure is for more than just developing code, but common concepts we take for granted like IaC, CI/CD, config management etc wasn't formalised or widely used back then and servers were pets that were held together with duct tape and sacred rituals. In many ways, that's what made being a sysadmin in that era fun. There wasn't any shame in hacking together a solution.

Deestan 6y ago

They might give you a call now, as the site just died from traffic.

ramraj07 6y ago
Which is weird - this site comes up on reddits front-page often and it has never gone down. Is HN higher traffic??
- trengorilla 6y ago
  Obviously not.

digitaltrees 6y ago

Posts like this make HN amazing. Thanks.

sradman 6y ago

> they were really pushing server side Javascript as the development language for the web (and mostly losing to mod_perl). Enterprise server-side JavaScript was the first stage of dynamic web servers that connected to relational databases. Netscape LiveWire, Sybase PowerDynamo, and Microsoft Active Server Pages (with interpreted LiveScript or VBScript) were early. The enterprise software industry switched to three tiered app server architectures with JVM/.net bytecode runtimes. Single-process, multi-threaded app/web servers were a novelty and none of the client drivers for the popular relational databases were thread safe initially. It took some time for RESTful architectures to shake-out.

mprovost 6y ago
Apache (and mod_perl) was thread safe by being multi-process, single threaded. You were always limited by how many perl interpreters could fit in RAM simultaneously. Then came the era of the Java app server (Weblogic and WebSphere). Everyone has mostly forgotten AOLserver (and TCL!). Almost everyone of that generation was influenced to use a RDBMS as a backend by Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing which came out in 1998.[0] Although I never actually met anyone who used AOLserver itself! Everyone took the idea and implemented it in ASP or perl, until the world succumbed to EJBs. [0] https://philip.greenspun.com/panda/ https://philip.greenspun.com/panda/
- djweis 6y ago
  AOLserver was a joy. I was able to speak about it at the O'Reilly OSCON in 2000 or so.
- kwoff 6y ago
  I used AOLserver with OpenACS, https://openacs.org/ https://openacs.org/ . AOLserver was apparently more optimized than Apache (at the time, at least). My manager even had us (early 2000s) take a one-week(?) bootcamp at Ars Digita HQ in Boston. Though about the only thing I remember from it was the fancy aeron chairs.
- silverbacknet 6y ago
  That was also the era when DBMS locking was iffy, so competing inserts/updates would happen once sites got too busy, and everyone was encouraged to turn off transactions (or, on MySQL, just use MyISAM instead of InnoDB) and put it on XFS or even tempfs for speed. So many websites I remember came back up with "the last two weeks of posts are gone, sorry" or just shut down for good because it was all too corrupted to fix, and so were the backups, if they had any.

palad1n 6y ago

Funny you mentioned matrix.com; back between Matrix 1 and Matrix Reloaded I knew someone who knew the guy who owned thematrix.com and apparently was not offered enough to sell it. I guess they must have agreed at some point because I also recall that the matrix.com at around the time of Reloaded then started to redirect to the canonical Matrix site (which it sort of does now). Wonder what the price turned out to be.

bartread 6y ago
> matrix.com at around the time of Reloaded then started to redirect to the canonical Matrix site (which it sort of does now) Actually matrix.com now appears to be a site relating to hairstyling and haircare products.
- smolder 6y ago
  I think they meant thematrix.com which forwards to a WB site; maybe autocorrect added the space.
  - palad1n 6y ago
    Yes, that is the case. Autocorrect strikes again.

lmilcin 6y ago

"We were forbidden from running scans again by management" Seems like management believes it is better to wait for real bad actor to purposefully destroy your site than have it done by your honest employees by accident. I know security in 2001 was much more lax (I started in 2000) but this still shows ignorance of management. The right way to handle this would be to ask your staff to ensure it is possible to restore services and to ensure you know what the tests are doing before you run them.

EthanHeilman 6y ago
>Seems like management believes it is better to wait for real bad actor to purposefully destroy your site than have it done by your honest employees by accident. From a politics standpoint that is completely true. Which would you rather tell your boss: Q: Why is the website offline? A: One of our sys admins accidentally deleted it. OR Q: Why is the website offline? A: Some nation-state/teenager launched a sophisticated cyber attack, we need to increase the cybersecurity budget. It's the wildwest out there!
- lmilcin 6y ago
  There is this saying that only a person that does absolutely nothing never makes any mistakes. Mistakes are normal course of action at a corporation. Sane managers will understand that is not possible to not have people make any mistakes. Mistakes are part of the learning process. Now, when somebody makes a mistake what I am looking for are: Does this person show good judgment? Were precautions taken by the person reasonable? Does the mistake show pattern of abnormality? Some people seem to attract failure, maybe there is some underlying cause? Is the person learning from mistakes? Learning is expensive, if somebody made an expensive mistake I want as much learning as possible for the expense. Is there some kind of external factor that made the mistake possible or more likely? Usually it is possible to improve the environment to reduce the number of mistakes. As to preventing these guys from scanning ever again, that is bad decision because it is likely they would never make the same mistake again. What's done is done. The scan showed there are problems with the app, now we should want to know if there are more problems but without risking the application stability (too much). --- -- Do you know what the Big Co. pays when they pay high salary for an experienced engineer? -- They pay for all the mistakes he/she made at her previous place.

steverit 6y ago

> I still mention maintaining this site on my CV and LinkedIn - disappointingly I've never been asked about it in an interview. I suspect most of the people doing the interviewing these days are too young to remember it. This is astonishing to me. I check back to see if this site is still up once every year or two just to have a smile. If you were sitting across from me in an interview I am quite sure I'd lose all pretense of professionalism and ask you about nothing else for the hour.

slg 6y ago
>This is astonishing to me. I check back to see if this site is still up once every year or two just to have a smile. The only reason I am sad about the death of flash is that it has all but killed my version of this: zombo.com.
- subpar 6y ago
  wow, what a way to learn that zombo is dead. RIP zombocom
  - slg 6y ago
    It isn't quite dead yet. It is just entirely Flash based so it likely won't make it to 2021. Safari has already blocked Flash completely while the other major browsers require you to manually enable it. Odds are those too will begin blocking Flash completely sometime in the next few months with Adobe set to end official support at the end of the year. So maybe add zombo.com to your Chrome whitelist and visit it one more time, because soon the infinite won't be possible.
- GauntletWizard 6y ago
  https://html5zombo.com/ https://html5zombo.com/ might assuage your grief a bit.
  - slg 6y ago
    Thanks. This like that old trope of a child's pet fish dying and the parents buy a nearly identical fish to swap it in and pretend nothing happened.

acheron 6y ago

> Another fun fact about NES - they were really pushing server side Javascript as the development language for the web I started “web stuff” with Apache and Perl CGI, and I knew NES existed but never used or saw it myself. I had no idea “server side JavaScript” was a thing back then. That’s hilarious.

mywittyname 6y ago
I entered around the time LAMP took over and the old-timers would always trash on server-side javascript.
- acheron 6y ago
  > the old-timers would always trash on server-side javascript. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

SmokeyHamster 6y ago

>the person who had just written a book on server side js for O'Reilly - he got his advance but they didn't publish it because by the time he had finished it they considered it a "dead technology". Makes sense. This server-side Javascript thing will never take off. The Internet in general is really just a passing fad!

mindentropy 6y ago

What machine is this being hosted now? Is it the same Solaris machine?

mprovost 6y ago
Your comment made me remember netcraft.com which was the tool we always used to see which web server and OS was running a site. There was a running joke back in the day on slashdot about "BSD is dying" as Linux started to take over, based around Netcraft which used to publish a report showing which servers were most popular. I'm glad to see they haven't changed their logo in 20 years! Their site report used to show an entire history so you could see every time they changed servers but it doesn't look like it does anymore. Now it's running in AWS so certainly not the same Solaris server. Although those E4500s were built like tanks so it could be plugged in somewhere... https://sitereport.netcraft.com/?url=https://www.spacejam.com&refresh=1# https://sitereport.netcraft.com/?url=https://www.spacejam.co...
- mindentropy 6y ago
  > here was a running joke back in the day on slashdot about "BSD is dying" Lol. I used to read Slashdot when I was in college and that time the running joke was "Had Netcraft confirmed it?", right? > Now it's running in AWS so certainly not the same Solaris server. Hmm. Would they have maintained the site to run on modern software stack or would they have just used legacy emulator like this: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/apn/re-hosting-sparc-alpha-or-other-legacy-systems-to-aws-with-stromasys/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/apn/re-hosting-sparc-alpha-or-o...

lucasverra 6y ago

I used this site as teaching Material for young adults the concept of A Webpage that is not an app. Also Space jam has « style » to be compared to « wikipedia » that is « pure html text »

olingern 6y ago

I submitted this and thought, "this is neat." Didn't expect to return to it being on the front-page nor the former webmaster to show up. The internet is a fun place. That background story is fascinating. I wonder how many full-circles server side JavaScript has made up until now.

klyrs 6y ago

> Fun fact, unlike Apache, NES enabled the HTTP DELETE method out of the box and it had to be disabled in your config. We found that out the hard way when one of the sysadmins ran a vulnerability scanner which deleted all the websites. We were forbidden from running scans again by management. Oh man, the early days were so exciting. Like that time I told my boss not to use Alexa on our admin page out of general paranoia... and a few days later a bunch of content got deleted from our mainpage because they spidered a bunch of [delete] links. I learned my lesson; secured the admin site a lil better and upgraded to delete buttons. Boss kept on using Alexa on the admin page tho.

carldaddy 6y ago

Thanks for the story! Also, I wish 'webmaster' was still a title used in the industry.