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Microsoft bought Hotmail in 1997. Hotmail was programmed in C++ and Perl--both of these programming languages had already been ported to NT at that time. It t

Microsoft bought Hotmail in 1997. Hotmail was programmed in C++ and Perl--both of these programming languages had already been ported to NT at that time. It took them 7 years to get it stable enough to run on Windows Server, and they had to rewrite the entire stack to do it. Until then, they were running the service on Unix. https://news.softpedia.com/news/Windows-Live-Hotmail-Was-Powered-by-UNIX-Servers-until-2004-131323.shtml https://news.softpedia.com/news/Windows-Live-Hotmail-Was-Pow...

jborean93 5y ago
I think the parent comment is talking about the NT kernel rather than the Win32 subsystem that is Windows. Today NT really only has 1 subsystem (Windows) but it definitely can support multiple ones, it even had one for Unix (really more a POSIX layer) back in the day.
- EvanAnderson 5y ago
  Two subsystems for POSIX, really. There was the original POSIX subsystem[0] that shipped in NT 3.1 thru 4.0, and the third-party OpenNT that became Interix[1] after Microsoft purchased it. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_POSIX_subsystem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_POSIX_subsystem [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Services_for_UNIX https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Services_for_UNIX