Ask HN: What were tech stacks like during the dot com boom?

[safetyscissors]

Hi All,

I was pretty young during the dot com boom and I was talking about it with some guys at work when they experienced the crash. It got me thinking about what tech stacks were companies or startups using at the time and what was it like to maintain them/keep them running.

[segmondy]

At the very start around 95,96 tech stack was a Linux or FreeBSD box running apache, configured for cgi-bin to execute whatever program/script you have. Programs were written in most programs were written in bash, perl & C, data was stored in text files

I personally started with bash, C & perl and storing data in text files. then moved to python and RDBMS

Those that were forward thinking were adopting php, python & java.

[matt_the_bass]

I feel like php was adopted much earlier than python and java.

I remember around 98 having some sun engineers come brief my team on Java Beans. They sounded really cool at the time. I guess Java Script ended up stealing Java Bean’s intended audience.

I wonder why java took so long to (briefly) take hold. Unlike Bill Joy’s other famous tools, Java doesnt hold up the way VI does today.

[jiscariot]

I had a part-time job/internship at the now defunct netradio.com in college. I can't speak to much of the stack because I was in operations and mainly tasked with keeping the streaming media channels online.

All the e-commerce sites were windows, I believe serving .asp. I remember an engineer "fixing" the occasionally timing out site dedicated to CD sales by putting in a VB script that rebooted the box every four hours.

The 120 streaming channels, were each tower desktop PC's on a rack, with hard-drives filled with music that DJ's would program during the day. Each one ran Windows Media Server and Real Player's version of that (can't recall the name). There was some bat file that would queue songs up in the background. Akamai was doing the CDN at the time.

I feel like I didn't know enough at the time to understand much of what was going on. Our NOC shifts would be 4PM-12AM, 12AM-8AM, etc. On turnover, you'd generally tell your replacement, "Cafe Jazz is f*cked." There was beer in the fridge and this one lady had a large dog by her cube that always barked at me.

If I recall, they were losing 1M a quarter and I think the main competitor was live365, which let individual users create stations. I left to pursue fulltime employment after graduating college, but After it went under, I know some of my fellow NOC techs found out they didn't have a job by either showing up to locked doors, or having a parent read about it in the newspaper.

So don't know much about the stack, but maybe someone will find this interesting. I couldn't have asked for a better job at the time. 12/hr and 1.5x overnights, 2x on Sundays was great money while attending a small WI school and way better than Hardees.

[debacle]

Lots of Perl. Lots and lots of Perl.

[gadders]

All kind of weird app servers. Netscape, Silverstream [1], AOL Server etc.

For a slice of pure nostalgia, you could read Philip Greenspun's book here [2]. Sadly he updated it in 2003, but some of the old AOLServer/TCL stuff is still in there.

[1] http://www.drdobbs.com/silverstream-20/184415712

[2] https://philip.greenspun.com/panda/

[jefflinwood]

Lots of Enterprise Java Beans (EJB) running on JRun or IBM WebSphere, IIS as the front-end web server, Microsoft SQL Server (or IBM DB/2) as the database server. Microsoft Windows NT servers or Sun Sparc servers.

Things weren't nearly as easy as they are now to deploy to servers.

[fiftyacorn]

Im a java dev, and it was all servlets, some early JSP's but time spent with early connection pools and early versions of tomcat

I always remember when EJB's first appeared on the scene as a cure all - but EJB1 wasnt. Session beans were ok - but Entity beans werent that great

We didnt unit test as much as we do now. There were early versions of junit - but it was difficult to configure in an enterprise environment. So you would go to workplaces and people would tell you they were testing - but then you look at the code and there were few tests

[osullivj]

Java was still new and cool in the late 90s. Sun shipped a lot of Solaris boxes, so an awful lot of stuff got built as Solaris, Apache, Oracle, Java. The SAOJ stack if you like, rather than LAMP.

[wprapido]

Perl. There were some totally forgotten technologies, like ColdFusion

Servers were much more expensive, primitive and harder to deploy to

[Random_Person]

Still the same stack I'm using today:

Linux/Apache/PHP/HTML/CSS - why complicate what works. :-D

[nickjj]

I used a decent amount of ASP Classic.