[HN Gopher] A website hosted on a floppy disk (Be patient while ...
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A website hosted on a floppy disk (Be patient while it's loading)
Author : mans82
Score : 122 points
Date : 2022-01-20 09:43 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (old.bigcat.space)
(TXT) w3m dump (old.bigcat.space)
| errcorrectcode wrote:
| Install Super PC-Kwik, smartdrv, or run it from a CF/USB
| emulator. Problem solved. ;-)
| yosito wrote:
| I'm imagining that the HN hug of death will literally set the
| floppy disks on fire.
| r0fl wrote:
| I almost spit my coffee out this morning because of this :)
| dncornholio wrote:
| iqanq wrote:
| That's what I was thinking. Look, I stored my site in a very
| slow medium. See, it's slow.
| vmception wrote:
| Reminds me of Hotline Connect file servers, sometimes people
| would host directories linking to different drives in their
| system, including the A: drive
|
| "See, its slow."
| schleck8 wrote:
| I think it's interesting and creative...
| dncornholio wrote:
| To me it's as interesting as putting a lawnmower engine in a
| container ship. Not even worth firing up because you know the
| ship won't move anywhere.
|
| I'd rather read about the story and implementation.
| jackomelon wrote:
| Lead with the positive curiosity of wanting to know how the
| author did this rather than your negativity of "what's the
| point?" The author could very well post a follow-up article
| detailing how
| dt3ft wrote:
| 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.
| smhenderson wrote:
| The site loaded for me. So I can tell you; it does not
| use IIS. And it's running on a 386 so I doubt there's any
| USB involved. What he pulled off is a lot more
| interesting than what you're describing.
|
| It was a fun thing he did to see if he could and when, to
| his apparent delight, it worked he decided to share his
| results. As someone who grew up in the era of floppy
| disks and constant worry about disk space and performance
| I found the whole thing very entertaining.
|
| Sometimes we need to take a break from all the serious
| and just have a little fun. Items like this guy's post
| are why I come to HN.
| jackomelon wrote:
| 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.
| dt3ft wrote:
| 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.
| IcePic wrote:
| One point could well be to see how your setup handles extreme
| overload?
|
| I guess different OSes and server software would handle it very
| differently, so using HN to trigger a huge overload would be a
| smart way to get some science done along those lines.
| hnlmorg wrote:
| The fact it exists is creative and interesting. One could even
| argue it's a piece of performance art.
|
| The fact the link doesn't work is, as you point out,
| inevitable. But that doesn't detract the artistic merit of the
| submission.
| smhenderson wrote:
| _But that doesn 't detract the artistic merit of the
| submission._
|
| Agreed, looked at in that light I'd suggest that it actually
| adds to the artistic expression. I was one of a few,
| apparently, that the site loaded for (sans images) and it was
| a tiny thrill to see it load. So, it felt like watching a
| performance of sorts, for me at least.
| bodge5000 wrote:
| Probably because the author found it fun and interesting to do.
| Not everything serves an audience (especially if you're not
| paying for it).
|
| It reminds me of the few times I've seen random people stumble
| across game jams and complain that they're unfinished and have
| bugs
| dt3ft wrote:
| Glad I'm not the only one thinking like this. Are we just too
| old and grumpy?
| account42 wrote:
| Not too old, just too grumpy.
| jackomelon wrote:
| Yes
| dang wrote:
| " _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
| dncornholio wrote:
| Agreed! Next time I will gather more arguments.
| iqanq wrote:
| Putting a static website in a floppy disk hardly qualifies as
| "work".
| jandrese wrote:
| Running a full OS with a TCP stack and drivers and host
| actual data (game demo) on 1.44MB is pretty impressive
| IMHO.
| dang wrote:
| Your comment was a shallow dismissal. Please don't post
| those.
| iqanq wrote:
| My comment was a shallow dismissal because the work is
| shallow. But okay.
| dang wrote:
| Those two things can easily both be true, and it doesn't
| change the fact that shallow comments are bad for HN and
| therefore against the rules here.
|
| It's perfectly possible to write a non-shallow comment
| about work that you consider shallow. More likely,
| though, there isn't much that's interesting to say about
| it, in which case you shouldn't post anything.
| ricardo81 wrote:
| Guess the ~1MB (probably less) is deliberately not paged into
| memory, HTTP 503 for me just now.
| john-doe wrote:
| Having images was a bit too optimistic I guess, ASCII drawings
| would have been more appropriate.
| masswerk wrote:
| Fun fact: Loading from 3.5" floppy disk used to be a good V.34
| simulator.
| laputan_machine wrote:
| Not sure how this works unless somehow (how?) deliberately
| disabling writes to memory. Not going to survive HN HoD.
| yowza wrote:
| I remember making websites in Frontpage and uploading them to
| Geocities.
| mdbauman wrote:
| https://archive.ph/YEv1x This archive from 03:58 has several of
| the images.
| barelysapient wrote:
| I can't in good conscious click the link.
| omgmajk wrote:
| 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/
| Hokusai wrote:
| > Location: Barcelona
|
| That is interesting as in winter and summer you will get a
| noticeable difference in availability. It varies between 9 and
| 15 hours of sun a day.
| errcorrectcode wrote:
| Nice! Next step: an Arduino website run from ambient RF energy
| harvesting. :))
| davidandgoliath wrote:
| This is amazing.
| emaro wrote:
| Which reminds _me_ of the http://solarprotocol.net/ I stumbled
| up on earlier today. It' a network of solar powered servers and
| the content of the site is delivered by the peer with the most
| sunshine.
| [deleted]
| phh wrote:
| Which reminds me of a catastrophe movie, where all countries
| launched all their nukes, and earth became radioactively
| poisoned. A submarine survived, looking for signs of life, and
| they received sporadic messages like "the whales are fine"
| (which made sense to them since whales live under-water). They
| went to the origin of the signal, only to find a computer
| turning on and off because of its solar panel, sending messages
| at every boot.
| CTOSian wrote:
| oh crap... now I had some sort of flashback from Fallout 4
| (Yangtze) :)
|
| Thanks guys for sharing the link of the movie.
| whoibrar wrote:
| This would be an interesting watch, I tried searching but
| couldn't find it, can you share the name of the movie?
| gelli wrote:
| I think it's On the Beach, a remake of a 1950s movie
| https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0219224/
|
| Here's the original: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0053137/
| fogihujy wrote:
| Brilliant book too! Well worth a read.
| KineticLensman wrote:
| > They went to the origin of the signal, only to find a
| computer turning on and off because of its solar panel,
| sending messages at every boot.
|
| In the original film [0] and book, the signal is caused by a
| soda-bottle being knocked by a window-blind against a Morse-
| code telegraph key.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Beach_(1959_film)
| AshamedCaptain wrote:
| Next: a website that loads from punched cards!
|
| Where to stop?
| errcorrectcode wrote:
| Eniac or Babbage Difference Engine doing HTTP/2.0. I can't
| remember if both are Turing complete, so it's an exercise for
| the maker.
| superjan wrote:
| An actual Turing machine maybe? I'm someone built one by now.
| progval wrote:
| Some people even built one in Lego http://rubens.ens-
| lyon.fr/
| CTOSian wrote:
| Punched tape (on loop) would be more suitable :)
| teitoklien wrote:
| Surely a website that doesn't exist but is left to the
| imagination of the reader
|
| Is the final stop
| Navarr wrote:
| https://www.zombo.com/
| corobo wrote:
| > Surely a website that doesn't exist but is left to the
| imagination of the reader
|
| A startup looking for funding, full circle
| datavirtue wrote:
| That's what I just experienced. They should probably
| upgrade to a zip drive.
| omgmajk wrote:
| I have one like that. It contains pictures of cats.
| hooby wrote:
| Pictures of Schroedinger cats, I presume?
| pferde wrote:
| Maybe.
| buitreVirtual wrote:
| Yes and no at the same time
| domesticsimian wrote:
| I'm pretty sure that website exists.
| hdjjhhvvhga wrote:
| 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.
| johnchristopher wrote:
| 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.
| robocat wrote:
| Nitpick++: A fair percentage of electricity in the world is
| powered by other stars, because Uranium didn't come from
| our star.
| madaxe_again wrote:
| 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 for me.
| jhoechtl wrote:
| Cool. Do you have a writeup of what you made and how?
| falcolas wrote:
| 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.
| headass wrote:
| this sounds really cool
| falcolas wrote:
| Some more info:
|
| https://gallatinhamradio.com/repeaters/BozemanAreaRepeate
| rs.... <- The Bridger Ridge one the one I went to.
|
| Some of those repeaters will let you patch into the phone
| system. It's slick stuff, but I haven't worked with it
| for a few decades now.
| charcircuit wrote:
| Couldn't you cache the entire site? The speed of the floppy
| shouldn't matter that much.
| smhenderson wrote:
| 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...
| charcircuit wrote:
| If you wanted to prove that, wouldn't you want to make it
| scale to handle HN traffic. I'm sure it would be possible.
| rightbyte wrote:
| That would remove the fun wouldn't it? I want to believe there
| is that crunching floppy sound when I press a link.
| charcircuit wrote:
| 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.
| codazoda wrote:
| Making sites fit would be pretty easy. Images will probably
| be your biggest piece of data.
|
| Sony used to have a floppy disk based digital camera. I
| think it could take about 20 pictures per disk. Plus, I'm
| sure you could reduce that size.
| andai wrote:
| You could store about 240,000 words, or about 2-3 novels.
| rightbyte wrote:
| 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.
| sam0x17 wrote:
| Considering this is on HN, I'm just going to assume it won't load
| if I click haha.
| pawelwentpawel wrote:
| 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 :)
| redleader55 wrote:
| I am curious about the reliability of this media - how many
| requests until the floppy is busted. Can the website owner
| comment on this?
| kroltan wrote:
| F5 and a tally!
| sodimel wrote:
| A gif just loaded[0]! That means that the computer is alive, and
| the floppy still somewhat works. No luck in trying the homepage.
|
| [0] https://old.bigcat.space/278062.gif - here it is for the
| curious: https://imgur.com/a/AfcEnRw
|
| edit: the website just loaded, but not the images. It's still
| alive.
| boogies wrote:
| Second link minus JS: https://imgin.voidnet.tech/a/AfcEnRw
| hnlmorg wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I found one of my earliest web sites from 1996 on a floppy not
| long ago. It was surprisingly awesome.
| brazzy wrote:
| 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).
| garou wrote:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20220120092324/https://old.bigca...
| Not on a floppy disk but kills the curiosity
| akuji1993 wrote:
| Aaaaaand it's gone.
| severak_cz wrote:
| 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.
| iso1631 wrote:
| 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)
| AshamedCaptain wrote:
| DOS does: https://home.csulb.edu/~murdock/buffers.html
| iso1631 wrote:
| Nice, although if it is set to 15, that's only 7,680 bytes
| of buffer, and even 99 is just 50,688 bytes. It's not
| loading now, but I suspect a single load of all those
| images will flush that data
| Delk wrote:
| I can't remember how buffers in DOS work, but that page
| seems to indicate that for input purposes they're used as
| some kind of a read-ahead buffer. That doesn't sound quite
| the same as keeping recently or commonly accessed data in
| RAM to speed repeated access.
|
| DOS did have SmartDrive [1], though, which IIRC provided a
| more typical disk cache. I wouldn't think it was loaded in
| the default configuration, though I'm not sure.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SmartDrive
| account42 wrote:
| 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.
| jraedisch wrote:
| You need somewhere to persist writes from those CGI scripts.
| wmitty wrote:
| 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...
| jandrese wrote:
| 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).
| colonwqbang wrote:
| 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.
| colejohnson66 wrote:
| Don't all modern operating systems have a RAM-based disk
| cache?
| colonwqbang wrote:
| I don't have deep knowledge of any other operating system.
| But I'm sure you are right.
| EGreg wrote:
| "Service Unavailable"
|
| Can someone re-insert the disk please??
| hobomatic wrote:
| This may not be enough. They may have to click open the window
| a few times and blow on it
| Omnius wrote:
| Someone needs to flip it over mid load.
| HPsquared wrote:
| I'll check back in a couple of weeks...
| whoomp12342 wrote:
| error 503.F0064 : floppy disk ejected
| [deleted]
| zfxfr wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Are you asking about how many requests per second - or about
| how many request per floppy (before that needs replacing)? ;)
| zfxfr wrote:
| Yes sorry, I meant I'll be curious to know how many requests
| per second that floppy can handle. Well for sure it's not
| enough for instance since I still get 503 :). Since I am
| curious so I'll just bookmark for next time.
| mrmattyboy wrote:
| Yeh, if it is down, it's sad that the HN effect has caused
| the death of a floppy or floppy drive :( haha
| CTOSian wrote:
| are we talking about the same site ? as the pages on the
| archive org version say: "The specs: .... a 256MB IDE Disk on
| Module."
| mrmattyboy wrote:
| I imagine the OS is on the IDE disk and the floppy disk
| contains the files for the website
| smogblock wrote:
| [deleted]
| margofx wrote:
| 503 Service Unavailable - is there any screenshot of the website
| itself? I'd like to check it out.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Don't copy that floppy!
| smogblock wrote:
| tluyben2 wrote:
| 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.
| gleventhal wrote:
| and, surprise! It's down. "I stored my knapsack in my toilet, and
| look: it's wet".
| lopis wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| Having had small CRT monitors, I can't tell if this is true or
| trolling.
| andai wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| commandnotfound wrote:
| Error 503 is intended?
| smogblock wrote:
| no it's just down from too much traffic
| jhgb wrote:
| So...what is the 503 page served from, then? ;)
| Tabular-Iceberg wrote:
| Probably a reverse proxy running on a modern machine, for
| security.
| Shamii wrote:
| Linux had page cache for a while. Not sure what this should show.
|
| Independently can we pls stop using floppy disks to show how
| slow, fast, small or big something else is in comparison?
|
| I haven't had a floppy disk in my hands for 19 years and they
| were shitty 2000 already.
|
| I also guess even less people are even getting anything out of
| floppy disk comparisons.
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(page generated 2022-01-20 23:01 UTC)