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.
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.
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.
Things weren't nearly as easy as they are now to deploy to servers.
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
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.
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.
Servers were much more expensive, primitive and harder to deploy to
Linux/Apache/PHP/HTML/CSS - why complicate what works. :-D
