O'reilly's camel book was my go to source for perl back in the day. (there is an old online version floating around) There are probably updated versions now. I did a similar thing with my website. My chipset encyclopedia works in the Mosaic browser as well as the original linemode browser. You can use the <isindex> search from HTML 1.somthing too.

Perhaps I'll have to setup a vintage site webring. Don't forget the under construction gifs and the killer background images!

My site: http://66.113.161.23/~mR_Slug/

mR_Slug wrote on 2021-03-06, 17:09:

O'reilly's camel book was my go to source for perl back in the day. (there is an old online version floating around) There are probably updated versions now. I did a similar thing with my website. My chipset encyclopedia works in the Mosaic browser as well as the original linemode browser. You can use the <isindex> search from HTML 1.somthing too.

Perhaps I'll have to setup a vintage site webring. Don't forget the under construction gifs and the killer background images!

My site: http://66.113.161.23/~mR_Slug/

Cool site 😀

I'll check out the O'Reilly books

Nice, it's really charming! 🙂👍

It's funny how human feelings work..
Just a few years ago I would have felt that this design is basic.
Looking backwards from 2021, it feels very tidy and professional.

The human mindset is really strange.
We don't know what we've got until it's gone.

A couple years ago I got really into this and made a bunch of old school websites. I don't think any of them are still online but I used this a lot: https://www.w3.org/TR/2018/SPSD-html32-20180315/

Of course that's just the official HTML 3.2 specification... but it helps. Although you'll probably need Netscape 3 for some of that.

As for early Javascript, I discovered very few resources. They are few and far between.

I've been thinking about something similar, since I'm in a similar situation but with an old dual s370 HP Netserver. I might actually end up really webhosting it from there though, and I was thinking about maybe allowing people to submit their own pages to be hosted (with manual approval, and complying to browser compatibility and content guidelines, as well as probably a maximum total data size). Probably would limit it to HTML2 and CSS1 and other 1996ish tier stuff, and probably no JS since the compatibility of any javascript version between ancient browsers is so bad. Maybe even have a gamut of old web browsers set up to test submitted pages on before putting them up.

If the pages are static and small it seems like such a lightweight task that the server would never be loaded down too much and the bandwidth usage wouldn't be much. Only thing is that I still need to figure out why I haven't been able to get all 3 SCSI-U3 bays to actually work in it properly so I can have a few in with RAID so everybody's sites don't go poof if the little laptop drive I have crammed inside right now does. Also need to wait a bit for to switch ISPs (I was gonna anyway) so I wouldn't be contending with the data cap I have now.

My current theory about the SCSI drives is spin-up current usage since I think I can make two work, though it's been a few years since I checked. I'm actually not even sure I haven't gotten rid of the 10K SCSI drives I bought for the thing.

Error 0x7CF wrote on 2021-03-06, 23:28:

I've been thinking about something similar, since I'm in a similar situation but with an old dual s370 HP Netserver. I might actually end up really webhosting it from there though, and I was thinking about maybe allowing people to submit their own pages to be hosted (with manual approval, and complying to browser compatibility and content guidelines, as well as probably a maximum total data size). Probably would limit it to HTML2 and CSS1 and other 1996ish tier stuff, and probably no JS since the compatibility of any javascript version between ancient browsers is so bad. Maybe even have a gamut of old web browsers set up to test submitted pages on before putting them up.

I'd love to host it publically on my own Win NT, but I just can't keep it online 24/7 due to different reasons of mainly the noise/heat it generates and value of the highly desirable components I have in it I don't want to degrade. If you would offer to host old-school websites I'm sure there would be an interest from others too.

keenmaster486 wrote on 2021-03-06, 22:46:

As for early Javascript, I discovered very few resources. They are few and far between.

I don't know for sure, but maybe books can be helpful here.
It maybe sounds strange, but in these days most resources about the internet could be found in libraries.

Depending on where you live, a visit to a local library or a bigger state library is worth a visit.
From my personal experience I can attest that these have some real treasures there.

I've found books there about the Windows 1.0 API, for example. One of them included a 5,25" diskette holding sample code! 😃

Another one was about fractals and included a 3,5" disk with applications for System 3 (Mac)..

Stuff like this hasn't survived in the wild, but still lives on in libraries.
That's why I visit the libraries in my city/town from time to time.

Maybe the same holds true for early books about the internet.
If you're lucky, you can find early issues with a companion disk/CD. 😀

Jo22 wrote on 2021-03-07, 00:01:

here you live, a visit to a local library or a bigger state library is worth a visit. From my personal experience I can attest t […]
Show full quote

here you live, a visit to a local library or a bigger state library is worth a visit.
From my personal experience I can attest that these have some real treasures there.

Stuff like this hasn't survived in the wild, but still lives on in libraries.
That's why I visit the libraries in my city/town from time to time.

Maybe the same holds true for early books about the internet.
If you're lucky, you can find early issues with a companion disk/CD. 😀

As a librarian, you're gonna want to use your information about your state and general region to figure out which of (state, local) libraries will be the less well funded or less well run, because less funding or less competent running means older books since either the flow of new books will be weaker or the outflow of old books for age/irrelevancy/damage will be weaker. Though if you can find a particular book you're looking for, your local library/system might be able to find it through an inter-library loan if it's not in your system. Also if a library has book sales it'll be older books since they'll be books that were weeded from the library's collection for age or damage, or got donated and didn't want, like old tech books. I ended up with some HTML4 books, C books, and DOS stuff this way, but those were likely going to be recycled or at least sent to the local Goodwill and not put in the book sale if I hadn't taken them. The system I work in is relatively strict about which technology books to have on the shelves since they go out of date quickly, unlike say history books, biographies, or other nonfiction. Tech biographies or tech history they're not so strict about of course.

I'd love to host the pages, give me a month or two to figure out what I'm doing with the drives and get the ISP switched. I'll be overhauling my home network in that time as well. I'll need some suggestions about what software is appropriate for webhosting on a dual socket 1GHz system. I could run a modern OS (Debian probably) and software but if there's anything I could do to run a retro OS and appropriate webserver I would 100% prefer to do that. HTTPS I don't see as a requirement if the pages are static in the first place and contain unsensitive data. Whatever software is running will need to be able to gracefully degrade to HTTP 1.0 and not have HTTPS set as absolutely mandatory, if it supports HTTPS. I don't have a lot of experience in this department but it's not like it has to be a 100% professional project.

Domain I'll probably just get from Google Domains if there's not a cheaper option.

The server hardware should look something like the following, my memory is foggy:
HP Netserver LP1000R 1U server
2x PIII-1000EB (I think it was? 1GHz in general)
1GB (maybe? fuzzy) ECC SDRAM-(133MHz?)
Ultra-3 SCSI drive controller with 2 drives in RAID 1, hot swappable. I think my drives were 300GB each and 10K RPM but we'll see if I can end up using those.
Intel PCI-x Gigabit ethernet NIC

The CPUs and NIC are already in, I don't remember what RAM is inside, and I just need to troubleshoot the hard drives, switch ISPs, fix my home network, register a domain, and configure the software.

You might look into NearlyFreeSpeech for hosting if you don't want to pay that much... they have very cheap rates and you can set up custom servers. You pay for what you use, pennies on the dollar compared to other dedicated/shared hosting services I've looked at, unless you get many thousands of visits or you are using a lot of storage.

Found some resources using Archive.org:

General (web, html, graphics, java, etc)
https://web.archive.org/web/19961220054054/ht … ww.gamelan.com/

Javascript:
https://web.archive.org/web/19991018215242fw_ … people/timothy/ (Timothy's JS site (best so far)
https://web.archive.org/web/19970606033550/ht … com/javascript/
https://web.archive.org/web/19961104235328/ht … qgrafx.com/411/
https://web.archive.org/web/19961222130927/ht … 9000/index.html
https://web.archive.org/web/19981202190014/ht … arch/index.html (JavaScript search)

CGI/Perl:
Matt's Script Archive (still online since 1995!) http://www.scriptarchive.com/
Extropia (also another resource still online) http://www.extropia.com/applications.html
https://web.archive.org/web/19970227193855/ht … pts/index.shtml

Yahoo's index page on CGI: https://web.archive.org/web/19970210004423/ht … eway_Interface/

I've got my server hardware and software figured out now, so as soon as I can figure out the networking and power setup around it I can start hosting pages. I'll probably start with a main page with some info and some links to period HTML documentation (W3C HTML 3.2 spec webpage anyone?) and tutorials. There's a couple For Dummies books from 1997 (HTML for Dummies 3rd edition, Creating Web Pages for Dummies 2nd edition) that seem great for creating web pages of that period, but I obviously can't host those (unless I asked Dummies Inc nicely?). Those books include CD-ROMs with webpage examples and creation software. I'd also like to find some way to set up a way for people to test the compatibility of their websites themselves with the oldest browsers out there (IE1/2, early Netscape, Spyglass Communicator, Mosaic) but I can't really see any way to do that without stepping on somebody's copyright toes.

Setup:
Hardware:
HP Netserver LP1000r
2xPIII-S Coppermine 1GHz
2x1GB ECC PC133
16GB IDE DOM (a little small but it's not like the pages are gonna be big eh? If I run out of space I could just DD this to a larger DOM. I lost the internal SCSI cable at some point and I wouldn't trust the spinning rust anyway.)
Integrated 100Mbit NIC (not gigabit but at the page sizes I'll be hosting it should hardly matter)
Software:
Windows Server 2003 SP2
Web server: Whatever the current latest Mongoose is
Other machine doing Dynamic DNS though probably DuckDNS <- not configured yet but it seems like a piece of cake
E-mail set up (not public yet) for page submission (manual approval)

TODO: some surrounding wiring stuff so the breaker doesn't throw when the hairdryer goes and need to actually make the main site page with links to the user pages and a subpage for FAQs, tutorials, other info

Thankfully my ISP doesn't seem to have port 80 blocked for me.
The server should be relatively secure since the only port that's going to be accessible is to the (modern and up to date) web server program Mongoose. All the others would be firewalled by virtue of not being forwarded.
Let me know if there are any super obvious glaring problems with this. I'm not worried about HTTPS since there won't be any signing in and I don't expect to host anything a hypothetical man-in-the-middle would really care to intercept.
I already know what the URL probably will be, my DuckDNS account owns it now, and I think it's a pretty good name. Don't want to share it yet so I can test it myself at the proper address before I announce it.

JavaScript? ewww. That's one thing I don't miss about the good old days.
Not sure if its because my early dial up days when the loading JavaScript status would bring my 486 down to a crawl, or later in life with the "this page as caused a javascript error"

Also been thinking of creating a few pages, just to justify installing old versions of IE or Netscape (I still miss the loading animations in the top right of browsers) on my retro PC's and give the retro servers something to do, but nothing publicly available.
but will keep it pure HTML for compatibility, but yeh, I suppose if your trying to recreate the feel of the 90's or see how modern? you can make a page look using 90's tech I'll allow it
(cause you know my opinion is worth so much 😜 )

@Error 0x7CF do put a link once it does go live, I'll defiantly come visit with my old rigs running Netscape 3/IE5 and up