"When Scott Thompson left Visa to take the CTO role at PayPal in 2005, the Web company's data centre surprised him. 'Wait a minute,' he recalls saying, 'they run a payment system on Linux?'
"'I was pretty familiar with payment systems and global trading systems, but I just scratched my head when I came here,' Thompson says. With his history of working on IBM mainframes and large Sun Solaris systems, the PayPal approach to computing seemed alien, especially for a company whose core mission was dealing with money..."
