[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.

[jeffbee]

I worked at a company that thought they had bought their way to reliability with Sun, Oracle, and NetApp but we had a three-day-long outage when some internal NetApp kernel thing overflowed on filers with more than 2^31 inodes. Later the same company had a giant dataloss outage when the hot spare Veritas head, an expensive Sun machine, decided it was the master while the old master also thought so, and together they trashed the entire Oracle database.

Both hardware and software in those days were, largely, steaming piles of shit. I have a feeling that many people who express nostalgia for those old Unix systems were probably 4 years old at the relevant time. Actually living through it wasn't any fun. Linux saved us from all that.

[wahern]

> Linux saved us from all that.

My fingers still habitually run `sync` when they're idling because of my innumerable experiences with filesystem corruption and data loss on Linux during the 1990s. There were just too many bugs that caused corruption (memory or disk) or crashes under heavy load or niche cases, and your best bet at preserving your data was to minimize the window when the disk could be in a stale or, especially, inconsistent state. ext3, which implemented a journal and (modulo bugs) guaranteed constant consistent disk state, didn't come until 2001. XFS was ported to Linux also in 2001, though it was extremely unreliable (on Linux, at least) for several more years.

Of course, if you were mostly only serving read-only data via HTTP or FTP, or otherwise running typical 90s websites (Perl CGI, PHP, etc, with intrinsically resilient write patterns[1]), then Linux rocked. Mostly because of ergonomics and accessibility (cost, complexity); and the toolchain and development environment (GNU userland, distribution binary packages, etc) were the bigger reasons for that. Travails with commercial corporate software weren't very common because it was uncommon for vendors to port products to Linux and uncommon for people to bother running them, especially in scenarios where traditional Unix systems were used.

[1] Using something like GDBM was begging for unrecoverable corruption. Ironically, MySQL was fairly stable given the nature of usage patterns back then and their interaction with Linux' weak spots.

[ayewo]

Multiple folks on Twitter hinted at inaccuracies in Dan Rose’s recollection of events at Amazon. In fact, when you mentioned Paul Davis, I realized I was looking through the comments to see him [1] point out these inaccuracies since he is known to hang out here on HN.

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=pauldavisthe1st

[PaulDavisThe1st]

I can't point out inaccuracies for that time period, since I left in January of 1996.

[mtmail]

We had 2-3 Sun boxes at Amazon German '99/2000 but I'll be honest it was a pet project by the local IT director. Even having a different shell on those annoyed me. Compaq/DEC Alpha was used for customer service, fulfillment etc.

[PaulDavisThe1st]

It didn't use LaTeX anymore by the time I left in early 96. I had already templated the PDF that LaTeX used to generate, and written C code to instantiate the template for a given shipment.

[donflamenco]

Cool. I don't think I understood that aspect back then. I was tasked to look at converting the sun box sitting in the sodo DC to something else. I logged in and found latex but didn't understand it how it all fit together.