I mean SOAP fit right in with the zeitgeist of that era... I seem to remember we were sending XML (shudder), as we had quite a lot of other stuff using XML, but nothing as verbose as SOAP.

Our main CGI (yes...) written in C++ (I can hear you squirm from here) was also loosely inspired by CORBA (stop that screaming) in terms of "sort-of" exposing objects via router that automatically mapped URLs to objects, and which used XML for persistence and an XML based rendering pipeline (not that different from React components, actually, except all C++ and server side).

Hit all the 90's buzz words.

Yeah, I had quite a bit of XML flying around, plus the inevitable "all our vendors want to communicate via CSV over FTP", and some customer facing perl CGIs plus a daemon or two I'd written that usually spoke XML over TCP sockets.

Plus lots of NFS for the shared filestore that the qmail SMTP nodes and the courier/qmail-pop3d mail receipt nodes mounted.

Plus ... yeah, you can see why I thought we'd not find each others' setups -too- surprising.

So, no, not going to squirm, because I mean, yes, I know, but it all (mostly) worked and the customers weren't unusually unhappier with us than they are with any provider ;)