In the beginning, eBay used to run the frontends on Windows, with IIS. When they moved to something else, they kept the urls, because cool urls don't change.
In the beginning, eBay used to run the frontends on Windows, with IIS. When they moved to something else, they kept the urls, because cool urls don't change.
Unfortunately most of the people out there don't care about that - majority of the links I've set on my site over the decades are dead nowadays. If I ever get bored I'll write a script that'll check if there's an archive copy, and link to that.
I also went through quite a bit of effort to make sure _my_ links don't break. There are a handful of tools (like a dig wrapper for DNS lookups) which still can be reached as /cgi-bin/dig.cgi, even though they haven't been a standalone CGI script for two decades now. It's still technically CGI (just running as fastcgi nowadays), and the code base is just as good as you'd expect from what started as an experiment to see how much of a text markup parser I can write using perl regexp only.