Timeline

July 1, 1998 -- New technical management

VP of Technology hired at Salon, an NT shop with no UNIX presence
Systems infrastructure mostly on NT
- web servers (Netscape 3.5)
- content staging server
- ad server (Netgravity/Oracle)
- community server (Lundeen's WebX)
- DNS server (Metainfo)
- file/print server (NT services, using MacFile sharing)
Eudora Mail Server on Mac 6100 (!)
Rather frequent crashes, reboots, inexplicable failures accepted as "normal"
Previous experience with high volume web serving at CNN gave the initial motivation to migrate web serving infrastructure to Solaris/Sparc
The cost of Sun hardware/software forced consideration of other options