@mcc I worked at Tripod (owned by Lycos) when Lycos also acquired Angelfire. It turned out that the entire site (login, html editor, uploader, everything) was run on a single CGI that was written in C.

The CGI binary was named a.out, which I was told stood for “angelfire.out”.

This is unrelated to your 404 page, but I don’t get many chances to tell this story.

@jmelesky you didn't say but maybe you know and were just being coy, but `a.out` was the default filename for output from the C compiler if you didn't tell it a filename you wanted, which is kinda funny.

I'm kind of interested in how that program worked, because it's not that unusual today to have a monolithic process with url routing to modular components (like Django) but not usually in C, although I suppose there is Go now, so this design seems old and weird but actually has come back