[donflamenco]

He is wrong and is corrected later on in that tweet. At that time, AMZN was mostly DEC Digital Unix. The DNS and mail servers were Linux in 97. AMZN started with SUNW (pre 97), but switched to Digital Unix because it was 64bit and could fit the catalog into RAM.

[protomyth]

This tweet:

Peter Vosshall https://mobile.twitter.com/PeterVosshall/status/134769756024...

No. The entire fleet was Compaq/Digital Tru64 Alpha servers in 2000 (and '99, and '98). Amazon did use Sun servers in the earliest days but a bad experience with Sun support caused us to switch vendors.

So, the title is wrong.

[donflamenco]

Well, like every internet company in 99, there was SUN servers. There was a lone sun workstation that printed some of the shipping docs in latex. I believe that was left by Paul Barton Davis. By early 97, the website (Netscape) and database (Oracle) ran on DEC Alpha hardware. Peter is wrong about switching to Digital Unix because Sun had bad support. The switch happened for 64bit reasons.

There was almost a 24 hour outage of amazon.com because Digital Unix's AdvFS kept eating the oracle db files. Lots of crappy operating systems in the those days.

[projektfu]

But SPARC v9 (UltraSPARC) was already 64-bit (44-bit effective) at the time. There must have been more to it than just 64-bit addressing.