> This was also peak Sun, they were really driving the web in this era.
That's not how I remember it. That's how Sun would have liked to see it but it was Apache on Linux or BSD (or even SGI) that was far more prevalent, at least near me. And I spent a good bit of time in the same building as the local Sun dealership. You could not have paid me to use their warmed over and overpriced hardware. And that really is what I associated both SUN and SGI with: companies wasting money.
But hey, we're in a bubble so party like it's 1999. It's fine if your customers are doing the hype thing, but there is no reason to follow them off the cliff. Someone yesterday asked why Bezos doesn't buy one of the big AI players. That's why.
Well, I was and I know plenty of others that did the same. Slackware was 1993. By 1995 we even had Red Hat.
In 1995 NCSA was running just fine and from December onwards there was Apache. I had the first commercial version of the cam software out (which ran on SGI) and a year later it ran on PCs as well.
You were hobbyists, which was a tiny group compared to ISPs, where Sun’s hardware dominated. IBM and HP were competitors but they were less successful with ISPs. Were you in the US or Europe at the time?
You and your friends were probably hobbyists, hackers or small hosters. Datacenters (remember Exodus?) were full of Sun hardware, racked up & labelled with the ‘hot’ startups of early dot-com.
Sun systems were extremely popular in corporate Silicon Valley in the 1990s. VCs would push the more expensive systems onto their well-funded start-ups. Here's a big check, do what the other well-funded start-ups are doing and buy Sun. More cost effective Apache systems were very widely being used by start-ups on tighter budgets. But even Yahoo for example scaled itself on Apache, as did Geocities.
Can confirm. The dot-com era startups I was involved with all had Oracle DB on Sun hardware. Apache was common. Java was somewhat common if you could deal with its slowness. C++ was common if you could deal with memory problems or needed more speed / efficiency than Java.
The VCs I talked to said it was a business decision. They had money to invest, so startups could afford to buy soft & hard-ware that had gone through a QA cycle or two. The VCs figured the exit strategy for most of their startups would be via acquisition, possibly by another startup so they wanted to have a standard environment to make integrating companies tech stacks easier. Or at least less distracting.
I have this vague memory of Yahoo! execs complaining about Viaweb / Yahoo! Store being written in Lisp and management freaking out that they couldn't hire enough Lisp people fast enough. Or at least that's the story that was going around the valley. (Isn't Paul Graham around here somewhere? Or someone who could point to a canonical reference where he talks about Viaweb getting acquired by Yahoo!?)
That's not how I remember it. That's how Sun would have liked to see it but it was Apache on Linux or BSD (or even SGI) that was far more prevalent, at least near me. And I spent a good bit of time in the same building as the local Sun dealership. You could not have paid me to use their warmed over and overpriced hardware. And that really is what I associated both SUN and SGI with: companies wasting money.
But hey, we're in a bubble so party like it's 1999. It's fine if your customers are doing the hype thing, but there is no reason to follow them off the cliff. Someone yesterday asked why Bezos doesn't buy one of the big AI players. That's why.