Originally, as reported on Slashdot and Linux Today on September 16, 1999, the Queen's website at royal.gov.uk switched server OSs from Solaris to Red Hat Linux. This led to much smugness among the Slashdot crowd and semi-serious questioning about whether Red Hat can use the "By Appointment To Her Majesty The Queen" mark. For two years, nothing much changed.
Then, according to the November 2001 Netcraft survey, the server platform changed from Apache/Linux to Microsoft IIS/Windows 2000 in conjunction wi2th a significant overhaul to the royal.gov.uk website. The new website is said to 'take advantage of changes in Internet technology', includes both Flash and DHTML, and is ASP-based. At the same time, the netblock owner changed from the Government Centre for Information Systems to UUNET UK, suggesting that Buckingham Palace changed service providers as well as platforms.
The official press release about the change can be found at http://www.royal.gov.uk/output/Page855.asp . Additional information can be found at the Netcraft survey, http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph/?host=www.royal.gov.uk
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This writeup is copyright 2001,2004 D.G. Roberge and is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike licence. Details can be found at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/ . | 
