database, with the front end UI of the system being accessed through a web browser. One of the first of its kind to use a relational database with a web front end or a "true" web-based application, these deployments are now known a LAMP web application software stack. The CourseInfo team had leveraged MySQL in 1996/1997 just a few short years after the release of the original MySQL database system on May 23, 1995. The Cornell team had unique access to the Cornell Theory Center, now the Cornell Center for Advanced Computing and leveraged supercomputing power, one of the key pillars of the internet and ARPANET/NSFNET at the time. Blackboard In 1998, CourseInfo Llc., founded by Daniel Cane and Stephen Gilfus, and Blackboard LLC, founded by Michael Chasen and Matthew Pittinsky merged to form Blackboard Inc. The first e-learning product as Blackboard Inc. was branded "Blackboard's CourseInfo," but the CourseInfo brand was dropped in 2000. Product strategy Blackboard was one of the first businesses to provide a free offering "Blackboard.com" for instructors to create free "CourseSites". All of Blackboard technology for .com and related services were hosted onsite at 1899 L St NW in secure server rooms run by the company. The building's owners had to install extra power to support the server rooms on the 11th floor, and add individual AC capability on the rooftop to support the server rooms. Early on, the company needed to support a multi-platform, on-premise installation strategy as academic institutions were consuming both Unix based systems and Microsoft systems. Since the platform was built in PERL the company deployed mod_perl an extension to Apached that would also sit as a module to IIS on windows server machines, this allowed the team to create a multi-platform distribution model enhancing its relationships with ALL Unix based and Microsoft based server technologies. While working with the windows mod_perl the Blackboard engineering team found several bugs that then pushed back to Microsoft to fix in their deployment against IIS. As the company expanded its market and business relationships, Gilfus and Pittinsky (both company co-founders) wrote one of the world's first enterprise platform "App Strategies" Blackboard Product Strategy & Vision White Paper on Building Blocks (B2) Initiative outlining the launch of a "Building Blocks Initiative", introducing new thought concepts to extend the Blackboard Platform through plug-ins and 3rd party integrations and allowing for greater extensibility of the technology as