Running A Web Server On An Apple Lisa 2

pinqkandi writes: "Saw this come along the MacHTTP discussion list; some one got an Apple Lisa 2 running a web server. Quite an impressive feat. Be quick to check it out - they expect to shut it down about 8am CST on 1/2/02."

Down Already

[Super_Frosty]

No comments yet, and the server is already down.

How many more times do we have to /. some poor fool's web server?

Slashdot overdrive

[MadCamel]

Most older IP stacks for Apples have a low amount of available sockets, such as 16 or 32. Once those are all being used, the machine can no longer accept connections.. Thus this link suffered instant slashdot. Good job!

Re:Oh really?

[Inthewire]

"Netcraft says it's running Solaris."

From the Netcraft FAQ [netcraft.com]:

Why do you report impossible operating system/server combinations ?

Webservers that operate behind a caching system, load balancer, reverse proxy server or a firewall may sometimes report the operating system of the intermediate machine. Hence reports of 'Microsoft/IIS on Linux' may indicate that either the web server is behind a Linux server that is acting as a reverse proxy, or has configured the Akamai caching system such that the first request to the site goes to one of Akamai's servers [which run Linux], or as in the case of www.walmart.com has been configured to send a misleading signature.

I don't know that this is necessarily the case, but it may have bearing on the matter.

Here's the original message

[cshotton]

This is the original message as posted to the MacHTTP discussion list for those interested in the Lisa's details:

Hello All,
Due to the many requests, I just put on-line my Apple Lisa2 web
server.
Since I am not finished with my site content I am only going leave her
up till about 8:00am on 1/2/2002 US Central Time. Check it out at:

http://www.lisa2.com

Let me know what you think. As far as I know, She is the only Apple
Lisa2
based web server in the world, and she may be one of the oldest PC's
on the net!

My current config is:
Apple Lisa2
Lisa Screen Mod.
800K disk Mod.
1 Meg slot RAM
MacWorks+II Ver 2.5.5
XLerator 18 with 8 meg Fast RAM
Sun SCSI with QuickBoot ROM
500 Meg SCSI Drive with Apple ROM
Mac System 7.01?
MacTCP 2.06
MacHTTP 2.2.2

TCP/IP via MacIP to my RevB iMac running IPnetrouter.
iMac Modem @ 50K to net.

Thanks,
R

Re:Here's the original message

[x136]

Ah, this is no ordinary Lisa... This one's running at 18MHz with 9MB of RAM.
This is one hot-rodded Lisa... (A stock Lisa has a 5MHz chip and either 512k or 1MB of RAM)

Re:Here's the original message

[aberkvam]

Also it's running the MacWorks+II software which pretty much turns the Lisa into a Mac Plus. This thing really isn't a Lisa anymore. Of course I don't think a TCP/IP stack was ever implemented for the Lisa so it would be pretty much impossible to get a real Lisa up and running as a web server....

The 8am shutdown isn't permanent

[Peyna]

If you read the comments the guy made, he just put it up temporarily because some people asked him too, but there isn't any content, so he's taking it down at 8am, presumably to add content and fiddle with it some more. So for those of you complaining because it was slashdotted, it will be back, but I doubt he'll let /. find out so quickly if he can help it.

Re:Apple is rewriting history

[sakusha]

No, YOU are rewriting history, buying into BillG's revision of the GUI, to make it look like Apple was no innovator.

Apple was working on the GUI long before they ever saw Xerox PARC's demo, and before PARC even started their initial GUI work. This was all documented on slashdot ages ago, when Apple released some early GUI interface docs to Stanford. Go hunt it up.

And to put to rest that OTHER stupid rumor, Apple did not copy Xerox's GUI. Xerox licensed certain aspects of their GUI to Apple. Apple needed only a couple of pieces to finish the job, and Xerox made good royalties from Apple, more than they ever made from their own products. Apple did not copy Xerox, the Apple GUI was substantially superior to Xerox's. Xerox and had almost nothing in common with LisaOS or anything else.

Re:Okay, someone explain this....

[cbane]

www.lisa2.com isn't a Lisa, but it gives an HTTP redirect to an IP address. Here are the server headers (from the Netsol box):

HTTP/1.1 302 Found
Date: Wed, 02 Jan 2002 07:00:24 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.3 (Unix)
Location: http://204.248.48.2
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html

Re:Apple is rewriting history

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd have to support the original poster -- the Lisa was the first GUI-based personal computer that I recall. Sure, there was one obscure workstation line (from Xerox) that was GUI based, and some personal computers that could display graphics (e.g. Apple ][, IBM PC). But the Lisa was the first personal computer built with a purely graphical interface.

And the line about Lisa being a "blatant clone of Xerox" is pretty much wrong. Certainly Xerox (and SRI, for that matter) did a lot of groundbreaking GUI work that inspired Apple, but (1) Xerox was an investor in Apple at the time, and (2) Apple is responsible for many of the basic innovations that people expect in GUI's (e.g. the menu bar, the desktop/Finder, dragging window and icons with the mouse, document-centric user view). Read http://www-ee.stanford.edu/~siegman/interface_hist ory.html for a basic rundown of who invented what in GUI's -- pretty much Xerox, SRI and Apple. It's not a complete list, but it's a good simple reference. Or you can read http://www.archaic-apples.com/files/lisa/lisa-retr o.html for a more detailed writeup of the Lisa's history.

I will agree, though, that Apple blew the pricing for the Lisa. If they'd launched with the pricing they ended up at when it was too late ($3000 + $1000/application) instead of an all-in package ($10,000 for the machine and all 7 applications) it would have been quite competitive with PC's of the day, while $10K was simply too much all at once.

It's a shame -- the Lisa was a wonderful machine for its day, and even now is more advanced in a few ways than current mainstream machines. For example, when you shut a Lisa down it automatically saved state in all applications, and restored state when it started up, so your documents that you were working on would all reopen to the same place, etc. Also, the Lisa filesystem had a level of indirection between displayed names and files, so you could give any name to any file, or even have multiple files with the same name in the same directory (i.e. just like paper documents).

Re:It's been done before.

[bn557]

Unix was done by Ma Bell... MS LICENSED unix code and created their own implementation and called it Xenix. They didn't like it so they sold it to Santa Cruz Operations(SCO) who took the ms hack and fixed it up a bit. They realized that they could do better from sscratch(almost anyways) so they licensed it directly from AT&T and created SCO UNIX. Xenix was a SCO/MS joint project you might say

(HA, and I'm only 21)

Re:It's been done before.

[Anonymous Coward]

Howie: surely thats A/UX (apple unix originally for 68k then PPC) not AIX (IBM Unix originally for POWER then PPC)?

Not quite. A/UX needed at least a Motorola 68030, and it never ran on the PPC. The ultimate hardware for A/UX was/is the WGS95, a Quadra 950 with faster SCSI.

And don't call me Shirley.

Re:Cool, but as far as doing more Web with less...

[Anonymous Coward]

No, it is not a fake - even though it is not a real TCP/IP enabled device. It is only capable of sending precomputed HTTP/TCP/IP packets from an EEPROM memory and that's all it can do. Nobody in their right mind would call that TCP/IP (let alone RFC compliant!). It is totally useless in practice, but it is a cool demo IMHO.

Re:Slashdot overdrive

[Chris Mattern]

Lisa 2 didn't have a 1.44MB floppy, it had a
400K 3.5" floppy. But you could get it with a
10MB hard disk, which they probably have.

Chris Mattern