When Scott Thompson left Visa to take the CTO role at PayPal in 2005, the Web company's data centre surprised him. "Wait a minute," he recalls saying, "they run a payment system on Linux?"
"I was pretty familiar with payment systems and global trading systems, but I just scratched my head when I came here," Thompson says. With his history of working on IBM mainframes and large Sun Solaris systems, the PayPal approach to computing seemed alien, especially for a company whose core mission was dealing with money.
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