What does HackerNews think of aolserver?
AOLserver is America Online's Open-Source web server. AOLserver is the backbone of the largest and busiest production environments in the world. AOLserver is a multithreaded, Tcl-enabled web server used for large scale, dynamic web sites.
“AOLserver is the backbone of the largest and busiest production environments in the world.”
: )
That title must go to Nginx or Envoy these days.
Yeah, and on rereading the original article, the hack was just guessing the passwords to admin AIM accounts. I hope it wasn’t mine! From my perspective that is “works as designed”. I don’t think the TFA was ever put into AIM login, but it was all a while ago. But anyways, nice to seem one of the dumb names I came up with in the press. I also wrote wam (web authentication module), Hermes (messenger of the Gods - like buddy list but where users could add data sources to the list, with filters or alarms), Ewoks (“external web Oscar knowledge server”, an http server that allowed for easy integration into the server message framework we used) and re-wrote morf “master Oscar registration facility”. The original was a custom written no-SQL DB and we moved it to Sybase with sharding.). All C. All event loop based. All really solid infrastructure written by people doing it for the third time. Fun times. Had an actual agile process and brought the coolness of the internet to many people for the first time.
I could tell how they looked like from startup rooms in little offices spaces in Lisbon back in the early days of .com wave in late 90's, how AOLServer influenced the creation of Intervento's Safelayer framework, or how it got us to be approached by MSFT Portugal for adapting the same ideas to then still alpha version of .NET, however I am the right person to fully tell the story, better let that to the key persons, in case they feel like jumping in.
In any case, here is some education material for yourself,
https://zope.readthedocs.io/en/latest/zopebook/index.html
https://docs.huihoo.com/aolserver/intro/features.html
Making knowledge workers more effective and efficient replaces some of them.
I work at a former tech giant, now a small media company. 10-15 years ago, this company hired people to write a scalable TCL enabled webserver [1], a time series collection system, and all sorts of other basic software systems.
Today, you'd just use apache, graphite, etc. You wouldn't hire someone to build them for you. Technology has replaced developers.