Website hosted on a 24 year old Linux server

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...

Re: Website hosted on a 24 year old Linux server

#5

Post by sillysaurusx » Thu, Apr 06, 2023, 3:01 PM UTC

I remember how magical and mysterious a view counter used to feel when I was a kid. How did the website know when someone visited it? Where was the count stored? And how on earth could a website update its own HTML to show the new count?

Geocities days were magical. I wonder if kids today have similar thoughts about Twitter profiles and such. It’s probably much easier to pick up the knowledge — back then, it was balkanized across IRC and whatever we used before Google.

I also started writing a FF7 walkthrough all on a single page, because I didn’t know how to link from one page to another. I made the different chapters different font colors, reasoning that it was good enough to change the color when you’re trying to figure out which section to get to. Good times…

EDIT: Whoa. The view count is real time. You can see how quickly HN is hammering the page by refreshing it. The guestbook works too. I wonder what the tech stack looks like.

Doing this in modern times would be so complicated. You’ll need a database, then software to talk to the database, and maybe webpack.

Re: Website hosted on a 24 year old Linux server

#6

Post by bombcar » Thu, Apr 06, 2023, 3:08 PM UTC

seba_dos1 wrote: post #3

Except it's not, not really - it's hosted by Cloudflare which even requires you to enable JavaScript to pass.

The server may be 24 years old and serving pages, but it's only serving them to the Cloudflare cache, which is kinda meh.

Re: Website hosted on a 24 year old Linux server

#7

Post by bombcar » Thu, Apr 06, 2023, 3:09 PM UTC

ashleyn wrote: post #2

Surely hope that isn't running a 24-year old Linux distribution...

If it were, it could be any of these hot commodities: https://soft.lafibre.info/#year1999

Re: Website hosted on a 24 year old Linux server

#8

Post by zitterbewegung » Thu, Apr 06, 2023, 3:12 PM UTC

sillysaurusx wrote: post #5

I remember how magical and mysterious a view counter used to feel when I was a kid. How did the website know when someone visited it? Where was the count stored? And how on earth could a website update its own HTML to show the new count? Geocities days were magical. I wonder if kids today have similar thoughts about Twitter profiles and such. It’s probably much easier to pick up the knowledge — back then, it was balk…

Geocities got reincarnated as https://glitch.com/ and it has many more features and you can clone others sites or starter packs.

Re: Website hosted on a 24 year old Linux server

#9

Post by jonas-w » Thu, Apr 06, 2023, 3:17 PM UTC

ashleyn wrote: post #2

Surely hope that isn't running a 24-year old Linux distribution...

https://serialport.org/servers/cobalt/cobalt-raq-3/#specs

Originally it was 2.2

Re: Website hosted on a 24 year old Linux server

#10

Post by seba_dos1 » Thu, Apr 06, 2023, 3:17 PM UTC

sillysaurusx wrote: post #5

I remember how magical and mysterious a view counter used to feel when I was a kid. How did the website know when someone visited it? Where was the count stored? And how on earth could a website update its own HTML to show the new count? Geocities days were magical. I wonder if kids today have similar thoughts about Twitter profiles and such. It’s probably much easier to pick up the knowledge — back then, it was balk…

> Doing this in modern times would be so complicated.

No, it wouldn't. All you need to store this kind of data is a simple file. Most people would probably use PHP for something like that due to its ubiquity, but it could even be a few lines of bash, or Python, or Go, or whatever...