21–30 of 107 posts
They should try getting a more modern browser on there. If I remember correctly, while running my hand-me-down Gateway 2000 with Windows 3.11 in 1998, I managed to get Internet Explorer 3 or 4 installed after I downloaded it at a friend's house.
> It turns out a number of fundamental aspects of The Web have changed since this time. I wish they went into more detail what exactly changed and why these browsers no longer work, unless it was the PPP protocol they mentioned that is causing the issue.
HTTP 1.1 (1999, so way postdating Netscape 1.0) has a Host header that's sent with every request, which allows the client to communicate to the server which hostname the client thinks it's talking to. That allows today's world, with multiple hostnames colocated on the same IP, to work properly. But if you leave out the Host header the server doesn't know which of those sites you meant and will do ... something.
For example, this explains the defcon.org failure in their screenshots. In fact, you can try this at home in your favorite command-line:
1) Type
telnet www.defcon.org 80
Trying 162.222.171.206...
Connected to www.defcon.org.
Escape character is '^]'.
GET / HTTP/1.0
3) Repeat, but in step 2 type (or paste, since it closes the connection quickly):
GET / HTTP/1.1
Host: www.defcon.org
Same thing for www.whitehouse.gov (which is in fact a cname for www.whitehouse.gov.edgesuite.net which is a cname for www.eop-edge-lb.akadns.net which is a cname for a1128.dsch.akamai.net which you can bet needs the Host header to know which site you were accessing!).
And same thing for news.ycombinator.com, which is a cname for news.ycombinator.com.cdn.cloudflare.net which then resolves to an IP but doing a reverse DNS lookup on that IP says it's got at least "ns1.cloudflare.com" and "dns.cloudflare.com" as domain names that resolve to it... so it's clearly going to be looking at the Host header to see what you actually think you're talking to. You can even see this if you compare http://news.ycombinator.com.cdn.cloudflare.net/ to https://news.ycombinator.com/ even though one is a cname for the other.
"This means that somewhere, this instance needs to be connected to a proxy server, which assigns a 10.x.x.x address to the “Windows” machine, and then forwards the connections through. Basically, world’s weirdest, most hipster ISP on the face of the earth." I wonder if there will ever be a business case for things like this. I sit across the hall from a startup that sells mp3 gramaphones, etsy is a huge success, ther…
There's no doubt in my mind that nostalgia is a permanent phenomenon. Spencer wrote The Faerie Queene in deliberately antique english to appeal to people's nostalgia. And that was more that 400 years ago. There's been a market for classic cars almost as long as there's been cars. How many businesses will carve out a niche in long tail tech is harder to tell. I expect it will be like many things, many enter, few leave…
> It turns out a number of fundamental aspects of The Web have changed since this time. I wish they went into more detail what exactly changed and why these browsers no longer work, unless it was the PPP protocol they mentioned that is causing the issue.
In order to make these web sites work in the old browsers, it was necessary to
host them specially. In this modern world, a single server will typically host
multiple web sites from a single IP address. This works because modern web
browsers send a "Host" header saying which site they're actually looking
for. Old web browsers didn't do that: if you wanted to host a dozen sites on
a single server, that server had to have a dozen IP addresses, one for each
site. So these sites have dedicated addresses!
The web server also had to be configured to not send a "charset" parameter
on the "Content-Type" header, because the old browsers didn't know what
to make of that.See here for details: http://www.jwz.org/blog/2008/03/happy-run-some-old-web-brows...
> It turns out a number of fundamental aspects of The Web have changed since this time. I wish they went into more detail what exactly changed and why these browsers no longer work, unless it was the PPP protocol they mentioned that is causing the issue.
The most important change is that HTTP 1.0 assumed that each IP had a unique hostname. The HTTP request just got sent to the IP that resulted from the DNS lookup with no indication of what hostname was fed to DNS. HTTP 1.1 (1999, so way postdating Netscape 1.0) has a Host header that's sent with every request, which allows the client to communicate to the server which hostname the client thinks it's talking to. That…
They should try getting a more modern browser on there. If I remember correctly, while running my hand-me-down Gateway 2000 with Windows 3.11 in 1998, I managed to get Internet Explorer 3 or 4 installed after I downloaded it at a friend's house.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The most important change is that HTTP 1.0 assumed that each IP had a unique hostname. The HTTP request just got sent to the IP that resulted from the DNS lookup with no indication of what hostname was fed to DNS. HTTP 1.1 (1999, so way postdating Netscape 1.0) has a Host header that's sent with every request, which allows the client to communicate to the server which hostname the client thinks it's talking to. That…
From what I can tell, Netscape Navigator supported HTTP 1.1 from version 2.0 and up AND Navigator version 4.x ran on Windows 3.1. I wonder if there was a problem getting that version to run on their emulator.
"This means that somewhere, this instance needs to be connected to a proxy server, which assigns a 10.x.x.x address to the “Windows” machine, and then forwards the connections through. Basically, world’s weirdest, most hipster ISP on the face of the earth." I wonder if there will ever be a business case for things like this. I sit across the hall from a startup that sells mp3 gramaphones, etsy is a huge success, ther…
I think you can count on it as long as the 'retro gap' [1] holds at the current level.
[1] http://www.theonion.com/articles/us-dept-of-retro-warns-we-m...
"This means that somewhere, this instance needs to be connected to a proxy server, which assigns a 10.x.x.x address to the “Windows” machine, and then forwards the connections through. Basically, world’s weirdest, most hipster ISP on the face of the earth." I wonder if there will ever be a business case for things like this. I sit across the hall from a startup that sells mp3 gramaphones, etsy is a huge success, ther…
> It turns out a number of fundamental aspects of The Web have changed since this time. I wish they went into more detail what exactly changed and why these browsers no longer work, unless it was the PPP protocol they mentioned that is causing the issue.