4 ms·

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 FreeBS

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.

jeffrallen 3mo ago
Yes. This happened.
enigmo 3mo ago
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.
- kqgnkqgn 3mo ago
  Ah sounds like you actually might have been there. I'm sure you must have some interesting stories from that time
  - enigmo 3mo ago
    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.