[hugorodgerbrown]

> "Things got confusing for a few years (till about 2005)"

They weren't that confusing - remember the original "dotcom boom" (and bust) was in the 90s, not the 2000s - and although it didn't end well, people were building high volume, complex, transactional websites in those days, and it wasn't all Perl scripts.

I was a MSFT platform developer at the time, and I remember being acutely aware of the rise of Java as the web development language in 95/96 - and the subsequent explosion in Java application servers and associated 'platforms' - Silverstream, ATG, Blue Martini etc.