I can't wait for summer to enter the Retro Challenge so…I started now…
No to be honnest..in the last weeks I was working on a project which involved an old web server. I’m trying to get a Macintosh Plus connected to the Internet and on top of that running a web server on it.
There are a lot off challenges. First of all, a Macintosh Plus doesn’t have an Ethernet card on board… second it has no hard disk and third it is only capable running an old version of the Mac OS, System 6.0.8.
I can now say that I was able to do it and get a webserver running. I was inspired and helped by an old page I saved. You can have a look at my copy of it on:
http://webservermuseum.org/aurejac.html
I also download in 2001 his two images of 800K floppy disks and saw that he used a minimal system in combination with a small finder substitute. The also had a SCSI to Ethernet converter to get the Macintosh Plus online.
The approach I used was a little bit different. I build also a small system disk ( 7.0.1) with MacTCP and a substitude Finder (8K) on it and used my Quadra 800 as a Localtalk / TCP IP bridge with IPNetroute running on it. This makes it possible to combine a Ethernet and Localtalk network with TCP/IP.
On a separate external 800K floppy disk I use httpd4Mac as web server. This program from 1994/1995 is the oldest web server I could find which works without problems. It has problems with understanding modern browsers so it will answer with a 200 OK response but give a 400 error page to them. Fortunately this is 400 response page is hard coded in the application, so with the help of ResEdit I changed the content of this page to a more nice (but simple) response. Date information is totally wrong. If you use Lynx or an old browser you will see the real home page on the floppy disk. This is also a one liner, because the server is really slooooow!
I have it now online only for two days and it is running fine! I will work on it for the coming weeks and try to adjust and tweek it. I will also try to provide more information, disk images files, etc. You can see it running at. I not prommising how long it will be online, but surely this weekend!
http://macplus.webservermuseum.org/
I’m inspired by this project to collect more information about the history of web servers so i started a small web site:
http://www.webservermuseum.org
On this site I will post regularly about this subject. This article is also available at this site.