[ Thanks to mark rais for this
link. ]
“Just days prior to the release of the STAR report that filled
headlines back in the 1990’s our operations team installed and
configured twenty DEC Alpha’s. The assumption was that we were
going to see some seriously high volume and needed web servers
capable of processing the spikes. As some of you may recall, that
day’s web volume was indeed massive. The infrastructure setup at
the congressional website choked within a short period of time, and
soon even large media outlets were failing to keep up with the
requests.“I vividly remember quietly listening to one of the many
operation status calls that day, when someone interrupted the
conversation and notified us that a person from the Congressional
office was being patched into the call. The question posed to the
OPS personnel by this gentleman went something like this: ‘You’re
one of the few sites still delivering the report. How do we get a
machine like yours…?'”