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A website hosted on a floppy disk (Be patient while it's loading)

old.bigcat.space

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Re: A website hosted on a floppy disk (Be patient while it's loading)

#101

Post by falcolas »

madaxe_again wrote: post #49
hdjjhhvvhga wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately it is not fully solar - it is as far as it can go, but then it is connected to a home router connected to mains etc.

I do have a fully solar powered VPN gateway/LTE router/web server/Wi-Fi relay - in my case, it’s out of necessity, as I live in a deep valley, and the only way I could get internet access here was to stick a mast on top of a hill with an IP67 box of goodies and a solar panel and battery, and an LPDA and yagi antenna for LTE and 802.11n respectively. The web server isn’t public, but fulfils a few important functions f…

Sounds like our local ham relay station. On the top of the mountain, solar and deep cycle batteries, and a radio relay. All housed in a cheap little shack.

I was last up there around '98 to help top off the batteries with water, but it's still running strong today.

Re: A website hosted on a floppy disk (Be patient while it's loading)

#102

Post by dt3ft »

jackomelon wrote: post #48
dt3ft wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is there to talk about really? Hook up a USB floppy drive to an IIS machine, select the floppy as the source for the site and voila. Takes 1 minute to set up if you have a USB floppy drive hanging around.

It’s great that you already have an idea of how this was done; others may not. There’s a lot to talk about there for people unfamiliar, don’t you think? Saying otherwise would be very close-minded. It seems to me from your other comments in this thread that you’re intent on being negative / reductionist to others work without offering much to the conversation, so I will happily disengage with you now.

If you really checked my comment history, you’d see that I actually gave a warm compliment just a few days ago. I apprecite the work of others, but not necessarily when the work is trivial and keeps popping up on HN quite often.

Re: A website hosted on a floppy disk (Be patient while it's loading)

#103

Post by superjan »

AshamedCaptain wrote: post #14
omgmajk wrote: post #10

Reminds me of that blog/magazine who went fully solar and stopped thinking about uptime. What a time to be alive. https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/

Next: a website that loads from punched cards! Where to stop?

An actual Turing machine maybe? I’m someone built one by now.

Re: A website hosted on a floppy disk (Be patient while it's loading)

#105

Post by johnchristopher »

hdjjhhvvhga wrote: post #30
omgmajk wrote: post #10

Reminds me of that blog/magazine who went fully solar and stopped thinking about uptime. What a time to be alive. https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/

Unfortunately it is not fully solar - it is as far as it can go, but then it is connected to a home router connected to mains etc.

If you want to nitpick go all the way.

It's fully solar because a long time ago the sun got hot and the solar system got put together and that combination resulted in life and then later some sample of that life built a website with materials extracted from what the sun did to the original mess.

Re: A website hosted on a floppy disk (Be patient while it's loading)

#106

Post by rightbyte »

charcircuit wrote: post #80
rightbyte wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would remove the fun wouldn't it? I want to believe there is that crunching floppy sound when I press a link.

I've never used a floppy disk before so I wouldn't know that sound. I think making sure your site fits on it could be a challenge.

1.44 Mb is alot.

I used 56k modems to surf and a floppy would take like 1440/7 seconds to load at perfect conditions. Most pages loaded way faster than that.

edit: Nice could load the site now.

"Windows 3.11 for workgroups!

Xitami web server, because it's the only one that does no caching at all, so the website is always served fresh from the floppy."

Perfect stack.

Re: A website hosted on a floppy disk (Be patient while it's loading)

#107

Post by jandrese »

wmitty wrote: post #42
severak_cz wrote: post #20

Pragmatic approach would be host it from floppy disk, but have some caching proxy before it. It could cache into RAM, most modern machines have enough memory to cache many many many floppies. Even Raspberry Pi.

The website says that he uses: "Xitami web server, because it's the only one that does no caching at all, so the website is always served fresh from the floppy." Source: https://web.archive.org/web/20220120092324/https://old.bigca...

I was wondering how he prevented the kernel from caching the disk blocks in memory, but then I saw he is running it on a machine with 4MB of main memory, and presumably most of that is eaten up by the TCP stack, web server, and parallel ethernet drivers. Not to mention memory needed by the OS itself.

Even more surprising, his page isn't just pretty, it is functional! You can get a copy of the demo for Wolfenstein 3D off of the site (supposedly, I did not try).

Re: A website hosted on a floppy disk (Be patient while it's loading)

#108

Post by jandrese »

iqanq wrote: post #74
dang wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

" Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something. " https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Quoted post unavailable.

Running a full OS with a TCP stack and drivers and host actual data (game demo) on 1.44MB is pretty impressive IMHO.
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