luca bizzotto

A Brief History of Microsoft.com! Nothing official, just the conjecture as I recall it: Microsoft’s first internal webserver, circa 1988, was a Compaq 386 sitting in the HR copy room with a note on it to “Never Turn Off!!!” The first public site, about 1990, was run on a Northgate 486 scavenged from a build lab. It was used as a test bed for network changes, like the Winsock implementation. At one point, the site was hosted on a laptop – until “Craig” took his laptop on vacation and then chaos ensued! So ownership transferred to “Mark”, with it becoming a managed service. In 1995 we see the first “Death Star” website, as pictured here. It had initially been running on an EMWAC server, but shortly after the time of this screenshot, it was running IIS 0.9. Reports vary on the hardware – some say a Compaq 386, whereas others claim it was Compaq ProLiant under "Henry’s" desk in Building 2. Either way, it was migrated to a proper Dell rack mount server at this time, but it was still hosted informally. In the late 90s, hosting evolved from the makeshift “under a desk” arrangement to being hosted by ITG, Microsoft’s Internal Technology Group, in Building 11. Mark and his team set up the official site, including WWW, FTP, and even Gopher servers. Apparently, this setup used 3 Compaq 386 servers – at a cost of about $50K. Microsoft.com is now part of Microsoft’s global cloud ecosystem (i.e., Azure). It’s served by a massively distributed, load-balanced network of high-performance servers across multiple data centers and regions. Precise numbers are not public. Enjoy this random trivia? Repost and follow!