I'm guessing they probably could not have scaled as far and fast as they did without AWS. To me, this scalability is the cost of doing business as a younger growth company. As your workload becomes more predictable, this additional cost becomes less beneficial. I've come to see that often companies say they are saving money by moving off AWS, but much of these saving come as part of rearchitecting or optimizing their systems.
My first computer was a Gateway2000 486/DX 33MHz. I think it was the same one that Linus developed on. It had a programmable keyboard, and a 14.4 modem. You had to enter the video card clock timings manually to run X.
I installed the SLS linux distribution on about 50 3.5 inch floppy disks. I think disk 33 was corrupt. Programming was such an adventure back then. I miss those days.
Haha i had a 486/dx2-66 laptop and my first try using linux was in 1997 with Debian Bo, IIRC. Downloading over 28.8 modem (maybe it was 56k at that point?) took a LOOOOOONG time, and then trying to get XFree86 to work was no luck with that chipset, even thought it was an IBM computer. It didn't help that the only source of info was the computer itself so getting online in text mode with a usenet client to ask questions and then try to reboot and fail and getting back online etc.
It's amazing how far we've come with video drivers.
