Skip to content

Comment on Website hosted on a 24 year old Linux server

Comments

24 years is not actually THAT old...

The cpu (AMD K6-2 300 MHz) is a lot faster than a raspberry pi 1 for many things, it has 512mb of ram, so for running a simple webpage, it should still work good enough.

edit: especially with cloudflare infront of it...

Yes, around that time (circa 1999) there was the matchbox web server ar Stanford with much lower capabilities (as hardware):

https://web.archive.org/web/19991128033948/http://wearables....

The Matchbox Webserver, which is serving this and the other web pages to you, is a single-board AMD 486-SX computer with a 66 MHz CPU, 16 MB RAM, and 16 MB flash ROM, big enough to hold a useful amount of RedHat 5.2 Linux including the HTTP daemon that runs the web server.

Thanks for posting this, I thought it was long gone and forgotten. That server at one time was kept live on the Internet, and I showed that back in the day during a talk to demonstrate Linux capabilities. The page however says it was created in 1999, while I seem to recall it was about one year before, but the server is that one without doubt: I could never forget that photo showing it side by side with the matchbox.

Yes, first version was 1998, and was upgraded in 1999:

https://aruntechgeek.wordpress.com/2008/08/30/worlds-smalles...

AFAICR it stayed online several years.

It is to be noted how the project belonged to the "wearable" laboratory/section.

The related paper (it is a postcript inside a .gz archive) is still available:

http://boole.stanford.edu/iswc.ps.gz

here it is in .pdf format:

https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.18...

In 2000 Sergei Brin used it in a talk as an example of what could be done with mobile devices:

https://www.wired.com/2014/05/brin-mobile-2000/

Old GV opened both fine (even the gzipped PS).

There were micro Linux released on floppies such as basic Linux and mulinux.

+1

the og pi is still fairly capable, and you can achieve a lot with it if you offload a lot of things or write more efficient systems.

AboutSource Built by g1lg1l

Hackerly is an independent reader for Hacker News, built on the public HN API. Not affiliated with Y Combinator.