In case you didn’t know:
I’m the godfather of flitspaal.nu — and later flitspaal.nl. It was a Dutch-only website listing all fixed speed cameras in the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg. The site ran from the early 2000s until 2012, long before smartphones, apps or live navigation alerts were common.
This is a picture of the first hardware we ran our website on:
- Database: HP Netserver LC3 with Dual Pentium II 350Mhz (retroweb) and 512MB of RAM
- Webserver: Infamous Abit BH6 with Celeron 433Mhz ( on Slot-1 to Socket 370 board ) and 256MB of RAM (retroweb)
Fun fact: I tried to run the Celeron on a 100 MHz bus at 650 MHz. It didn’t just crash — it refused to even think about booting. The silicon gods said: no.
Oracle history
What most people don’t know is that flitspaal.nl actually ran on an Oracle stack.Yes — an Oracle database, an Oracle webserver, and the infamous Oracle Web Toolkit (htp.p FTW!). Although it didn’t start that way.
The very first version of flitspaal.nu was written in Turbo Pascal 7.0, with an export module that generated static HTML files. No CSS, no templates, nothing dynamic. Just raw HTML saved to disk which I had to manually upload to our webserver.
And that was the turning point.
From that moment on, flitspaal.nu ran on an Oracle DB instance at the company. By early 2002, we finally upgraded to our own hardware — the dual-Pentium II NetServer for the database and the Celeron box for the webserver — and the whole thing kept running for years.
That transition didn’t go smoothly though! At first I tried Linux, that wasn’t a real success and in the end I switched over to Windows 2000.
This is me having an argument with the HP Netserver LC3 and Linux
This is my actually trying to get Oracle running on the machine. That didn’t work out and decided to switch back to a platform I knew a lot better back in the day.
Switching to Windows 2000 — and yes, that’s co-conspirator Dexter in the background.
This is me late in the evening on 26/01/2002, getting the webserver to work. And yes, I got it working.
To this day, I’m genuinely grateful to Ton, the founder and owner of Desyde, for giving me the opportunity to run flitspaal.nl on Oracle software and host our hardware.
Fun facts
During a monsoon-like downpour, the basement where our servers were located flooded. Water and sparks do not mix well, and everything went black. When the water was finally pumped out and power was restored… only our servers came back to life. 😛 (The rest of the equipment needed a bit more convincing.)
Jeroen van Inkel mentioned our website sometime in the spring of 2002. That was our slashdot moment. Our database couldn’t handle the sudden load because it was badly optimized. Something with DB block buffers and the tiny amount of memory our machine had — they didn’t match. Not even close.The machine went down instantly.
That day I learned more about how Oracle databases work than any course, book or certification could ever have taught me. 🙂
And a crash due to heavy load never happened again — (except for a major fuckup from yours truly).
But that is for another blogpost 😛