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

#1

Post by safetyscissors » Thu, Aug 30, 2018, 12:17 PM UTC

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.

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

#2

Post by debacle » Thu, Aug 30, 2018, 1:30 PM UTC

Lots of Perl. Lots and lots of Perl.

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

#3

Post by osullivj » Thu, Aug 30, 2018, 1:35 PM UTC

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.

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

#4

Post by nickjj » Thu, Aug 30, 2018, 1:46 PM UTC

I used a decent amount of ASP Classic.

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

#5

Post by jefflinwood » Thu, Aug 30, 2018, 1:53 PM UTC

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.

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

#6

Post by segmondy » Thu, Aug 30, 2018, 3:01 PM UTC

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.

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

#7

Post by gadders » Thu, Aug 30, 2018, 4:02 PM UTC

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/

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

#8

Post by wprapido » Thu, Aug 30, 2018, 7:08 PM UTC

Perl. There were some totally forgotten technologies, like ColdFusion

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

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

#9

Post by fiftyacorn » Thu, Aug 30, 2018, 8:44 PM UTC

jefflinwood wrote: post #5

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.

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

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

#10

Post by matt_the_bass » Thu, Aug 30, 2018, 11:43 PM UTC

segmondy wrote: post #6

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 & j…

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.