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

135 points| mans82 | 4 years ago |old.bigcat.space | reply

128 comments

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[+] zfxfr|4 years ago|reply
Unsurprisingly I got a 503 error. I'll be more curious how many requests it can handle if it is really only on floppy (no caching etc..). 1.44 MB is plenty of space to host a nice website !
[+] hooby|4 years ago|reply
Are you asking about how many requests per second - or about how many request per floppy (before that needs replacing)? ;)
[+] lopis|4 years ago|reply
> Best viewed in uwutscape navigator at 640x480 or something

This is not true. It shows horizontal scroll at this resolution. Absolutely unusable in my 15" CRT.

[+] rovr138|4 years ago|reply
Having had small CRT monitors, I can't tell if this is true or trolling.
[+] hnlmorg|4 years ago|reply
I published my first website in 1994 via floppy disk.

I didn't have the internet at home so would design the website there, save to floppy disk, then go to the local library that had internet terminals you could hire for an hour. From there I'd upload the website from floppy disk.

[+] kingcharles|4 years ago|reply
I found one of my earliest web sites from 1996 on a floppy not long ago. It was surprisingly awesome.
[+] brazzy|4 years ago|reply
I did the same in 1996 (hosting at my univesity). On an Amiga. Which didn't even have a TCP/IP stack (I think you could get a commercial implementation).
[+] ricardo81|4 years ago|reply
Guess the ~1MB (probably less) is deliberately not paged into memory, HTTP 503 for me just now.
[+] john-doe|4 years ago|reply
Having images was a bit too optimistic I guess, ASCII drawings would have been more appropriate.
[+] yosito|4 years ago|reply
I'm imagining that the HN hug of death will literally set the floppy disks on fire.
[+] r0fl|4 years ago|reply
I almost spit my coffee out this morning because of this :)
[+] sam0x17|4 years ago|reply
Considering this is on HN, I'm just going to assume it won't load if I click haha.
[+] redleader55|4 years ago|reply
I am curious about the reliability of this media - how many requests until the floppy is busted. Can the website owner comment on this?
[+] pawelwentpawel|4 years ago|reply
Error 503 unfortunately. I promise I was patient.

Once back in the early 2000s I connected the floppy drive incorrectly and the entire thing melted inside with some smoke. It was rather funny at the time, mostly because it wasn't my computer. That said, I'm hoping bigcat.space r&d headquarters are not on fire and the website will be back up soon :)

[+] charcircuit|4 years ago|reply
Couldn't you cache the entire site? The speed of the floppy shouldn't matter that much.
[+] smhenderson|4 years ago|reply
I think that would defeat the point - one of the items on his site "feature" list says :

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.

So I think it's more about proving what you can do with old software/hardware when you put your mind to it...

[+] rightbyte|4 years ago|reply
That would remove the fun wouldn't it? I want to believe there is that crunching floppy sound when I press a link.
[+] severak_cz|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] account42|4 years ago|reply
The pragmatic approach would be to not host it from a floppy. If you are going to host it on a floppy then just having it all constantly in cache somewhat defeats the point.
[+] colonwqbang|4 years ago|reply
This is exactly what Linux will do by default, without any special setup or config. Everything goes through the buffer cache.

In fact, you would have to do active work to disable the caching.

[+] iso1631|4 years ago|reply
It's hosted on a machine with 4M of ram on windows 3.11, and specifically uses a web server which doesn't use caching (And I don't think Dos 6 caches files at the OS level, at least by default)
[+] tluyben2|4 years ago|reply
When I ran my BBS in the 80s, it was hosted on an 8 bit machine with 2 3.5 drives; however the BBS software itself which included all pages of the ‘site’ where on a ram disk of 256kb so they would load ‘instantly’. The 2 disks contained (weekly refreshed) public domain software and demos.

Now I am curious if I put it online (I still have the machine) how it would work. Seems fun to do.

[+] andai|4 years ago|reply
What is causing the 503 errors? Could the server be reconfigured with eg. a longer timeout to avoid them? (On that note, is there a limit to maximum timeout on the client-side?) Or is the actual hardware getting overwhelmed by the traffic?
[+] andai|4 years ago|reply
The whole machine only has 4MB of RAM so presumably at some point requests start getting dropped. Then again, you can store a lot of requests in even 1MB.
[+] yowza|4 years ago|reply
I remember making websites in Frontpage and uploading them to Geocities.
[+] EGreg|4 years ago|reply
"Service Unavailable"

Can someone re-insert the disk please??

[+] hobomatic|4 years ago|reply
This may not be enough. They may have to click open the window a few times and blow on it
[+] Omnius|4 years ago|reply
Someone needs to flip it over mid load.
[+] HPsquared|4 years ago|reply
I'll check back in a couple of weeks...