What's really interesting to me personally is how porn continues to stay ahead of, or at least at/near the front of, the pack technology/performance-wise. Back in the late 1990s and early 2000s I co-ran the technology department at a very large network of high-traffic adult web sites (I'm not sure exactly where we would have been in the rankings, but I'd take a wild guess to say it was top 20, if not top 10.) We were doing streaming video (in Real, QT, and WM) at a time when it was still images as the default. Reading comments from SystemOut and stickfigure reminded me of just how (obviously) primitive everything seems compared to today, but we still made it work. Some broad notes from the period:<p>- Started with single processor Sun SPARCs, which were later replaced by a dual and quad core ones (went from 32 to 64 bit early due to file size limitations), along with a collection of Linux boxes from Penguin Computing (remember them?) Most were in the mid-hundreds MHz range, topping out at a blazing 1GHz by the end.<p>- Apache, mod_perl, MySQL (postgres for one system), later replaced some of the front end code with PHP.<p>- No CDNs! Akamai was more or less the only game in town and was still unproven/considered too expensive at the time so we did traditional multiple-host setups (things like image1, image2, along with RRDNS for some other bits)<p>- No really good, well-integrated turnkey billing systems. The ones at the time often took too large a chunk of the revenue or were designed for low volume/were very inflexible. Custom billing code to directly talk to charge processors (we spoke a custom protocol right over UDP to ours. We had a dedicated line to the processor, too IIRC. Every time a transaction was processed, you got to hear a classic modem-like noise. The hardware on our side was connected to a text-terminal (Monochrome, orange text.)<p>- In-browser video started out using NPH tricks(!), later used a custom Java applet. Most, however, was served directly to separate client applications. In the days before the YouTubes and Vimeos came along, you had to yes, have your customers download 3rd party software and then provide support for it.<p>- RAID 1 under Linux at the time had some ugly bugs which would partially corrupt one of the mirrors, requiring weekly manual rebuilds. I had a script monitoring for corruption which would send an email to this crazy old device called a "pager." The corruption always seemed to occur 15 minutes after I fell asleep, too.<p>Anyhow, interesting to see just how far things have come. Impressive numbers.