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Desktops (Apple) Apple Idle

Vintage 30-Year-Old Mac Resurrected As a Web Server (rhyal.com) 66

Posted by EditorDavid from the computers-you-can-lift dept.
Long-time Slashdot reader Huxley_Dunsany writes: After much work rebuilding and upgrading it, my Macintosh SE/30 from 1989 is now connected via Ethernet to the Web, and is hosting a simple website and old-style "guestbook." The site has been online for a few days (other than semi-frequent reboots of the system when it gets overloaded with requests), and has served nearly 20,000 visitors. For a machine with a 16MHz CPU and 68 megabytes of ram, it's held up remarkably well!

I'm basically inviting a "Slashdotting" of my old Mac, but I thought this project might bring a few smiles here. Enjoy!
"Awesome," wrote one visitor in the guestbook, adding "You should join a webring!"
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Vintage 30-Year-Old Mac Resurrected As a Web Server More

Vintage 30-Year-Old Mac Resurrected As a Web Server

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  • whoops (Score:3)

    by lactose99 ( 71132 ) on Sunday August 11, 2019 @04:09PM (#59077178)

    www.rhyal.com refused to connect.

  • You've been Slashdotted! (Score:5, Funny)

    by cruff ( 171569 ) on Sunday August 11, 2019 @04:10PM (#59077180)

    I'm basically inviting a "Slashdotting" of my old Mac,

    Ask and you shall receive!

  • I did my part to slashdot the old server, and indeed got a connection refused.

    • A 1989 Mac SE/30? "Slashdotting it" would take, what - maybe 5 simultaneous visitors?

      • It has a lot of RAM (68M), I kind of wonder how many simultaneous visitors it could handle. The summary doesn't say. If you wrote your own minimalist web server (or found one that someone else had already written), I bet you could handle 50 simultaneous visitors.
    • I got 404 Host Not Found. Maybe the magic smoke came out?

  • Question 1: Why? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by I75BJC ( 4590021 )
    Question 2: Why is this a story?
    • Nostalgia. When was the last time you heard of a site being Slashdotted?

    • Because it's so bright you gotta wear shades!

    • Because they could, that's why. Some people like vintage hardware you insufferable cunt.

    • *sigh* (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Voyager529 ( 1363959 ) <voyager529@yahoo. c o m> on Monday August 12, 2019 @12:42AM (#59078056)

      Question 1: Why?

      To quote John F. Kennedy:
      "We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept..."

      It's 2019. For $50, I can buy a RasPi starter kit, spend an hour with my mom, walk her through flashing the card with DietPi, and she'll have a web server a hundred times more powerful than this one.
      I can grab an Optiplex 3010 for $100, hand it to her with a copy of the Turnkey Linux LAMP appliance, and she'll have a working web server almost by accident.

      The point isn't to be serving a web page. That's just the finish line.

      This project appeals to the person who took it on because it's hard. A Mac from 1989 predates basically every readily accessible piece of handholding.
      There sure as hell isn't any help from Apple about it. I'd love to watch a video of him taking this unit to an Apple Genius; it's quite possible the machine is older than them.
      There's nothing on StackOverflow about it.
      There are no Youtube tutorials for it.
      There's nothing in most user forums (unless maybe there's a vintage computing forum).
      There might be some Usenet posts about it, but that sort of an archaeological dig is a task unto itself. Manuals and textbooks are very unlikely to cover doing web serving.
      Apache, nginx, and other common web servers are unlikely to compile for the CPU architecture by default.

      This computer is undoubtedly less powerful than the router it's sitting behind. The fact that the submitter was able to get it to work is basically an indicator that, whatever procedures they did to get this machine running, are basically unique.

      Question 2: Why is this a story?

      ...Because it's fairly unique. The number of stories about these sorts of projects (and being successful in a manner that everyone reading can see) is something I'd like to see increase. We've had 1,001 stories about politics, Ajit Pai, and Donald Trump over the past 2-3 years. I can find that sort of thing anywhere. This sort of thing? Where would I find that? I'm happy to have read such a story and have visited those pages.

      Also, Slashdot is a community. I *might* agree that perhaps a more formalized standard about personal projects being submitted should exist. However, if a community member embarks on a quest to do something like this, and is successful? Hell yes!

      • There are several vintage Mac websites and forums. And by 1989 I think there were Mac OS web servers (i.e. proper GUI apps).

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Miser ( 36591 )

        Not only this, but when I tinker with tech and folks ask me why in the hell I do such things (a PBX at home, various midrange iron, etc).

        I can boil it down to something a bit simpler, even:

        "Because I CAN."

        If your a hobby is fun to someone, you should not condemn them if they enjoy themselves.

        Also, I almost accidentally posted Anonymously - and got an error that anonymous posting is turned off. What gives?

        -Miser

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Sorry guys! (Score:5, Informative)

    by Huxley_Dunsany ( 659554 ) <huckdunsany@@@mac...com> on Sunday August 11, 2019 @04:28PM (#59077212)
    Oh, of *course* the first time I ever make the front page of Slashdot (after 20 years of being a reader!), I've just landed on an out-of-state work trip, and thus cannot reboot my old Mac and bring it back online. Really sorry everyone! I swear the site was up and responding well a few days ago when I submitted this, and will be again when I get home again later this week.

  • Really: This guy made history.

    This is the first 68030 based Macintosh to have been the victim of a DDOS. There were routers with the 68000 series in them. Sure- they got attacked.

    But this is the first Macintosh of this vintage to be DDOSed or Slashdotted.

    This is noteworthy... just like those computers submerged in mineral oil or Fluorinert. This is news!!

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Etcetera ( 14711 )

      Really: This guy made history.

      This is the first 68030 based Macintosh to have been the victim of a DDOS. There were routers with the 68000 series in them. Sure- they got attacked.

      But this is the first Macintosh of this vintage to be DDOSed or Slashdotted.

      This is noteworthy... just like those computers submerged in mineral oil or Fluorinert. This is news!!

      Almost certainly not. There were a few servers that ran on Macs back in the day. In fact, because they weren't WinNuke-able and didn't have a unix terminal, classic Mac OS servers were often more resilient forward-facing boxes than Windows or early Linux. DDOS can take down anything of course, so certainly some got Slashdotted, but Mac servers were not uncommon.

      Among other things, I used to run SMTP (SIMS) and a few IRC bots (ShadowBot, I think) just because they'd confound a not insignificant number of hac

      • I designed my share of comms gear back in those days.
        The MC68302 was a favorite of mine. Choc full of comms interfaces and timers. A lot of packets went through those boxes.

      • NetBSD/mac68k was definitely around on the SE/30 by 1995, and bric-a-brac.apple.com was on A/UX and certainly unreachable at times.

      • I would never run a Mac OS on my SE/30 if I wanted to do useful things with it. I've had NetBSD on it for over a decade. Ok, it doesn't get turned on very often. But with NetBSD on it, it would make an ok web server.

  • 68 MB (Score:3)

    by JoeCommodore ( 567479 ) <larry@portcommodore.com> on Sunday August 11, 2019 @04:40PM (#59077240) Homepage

    68 MB? Wow, that's a lot of RAM. (for a Mac SE/30 - really!)

    • I think 68 MB is a typo, 64MB makes sense. But you could upgrade the SE/30 to 128MB RAM if you also replaced the ROM SIMM with one from a Mac IIsi.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by cruff ( 171569 )
        Probably not, 4 MB on the motherboard and 64 MB on the 030 CPU card? Apples of that era had odd sizes when maxed out on memory.
        • Yeah, my Amigas were the same way... One had 3MB on a Zorro expansion card and another 8MB on the 030 accelerator (64-bit memory bus!) and I think 1MB on the Mobo? And the other had 12MB on something and then 64MB on the Cyberstorm and then I just added the 4MB of the Picasso IV and said I had 80MB. (An 80MB Amiga can frag memory for ages!)

      • The SE/30 uses the old 30 pin SIMMs. I have a set of 4 of the extremely rare 16MB 30 pin SIMMs but I am pretty sure I have them in a SparcStation IPC instead of any of my SE/30s.

      • I think 68 MB is a typo, 64MB makes sense. But you could upgrade the SE/30 to 128MB RAM if you also replaced the ROM SIMM with one from a Mac IIsi.

        Hi! This is my Mac being referenced in the original post. It really does show 68megs of RAM in the "About This Mac..." box. I'm out of town right now (which is why my site went offline just as this post hit the front page, sigh) and can't double-check, but I think the odd RAM count is a side-effect of the custom ROM I've installed in the machine. I'm using a "Mac ROM-inator II" from Big Mess o' Wires. This ROM upgrade does a bunch of cool stuff - custom startup sound, skips the RAM test on power-up (major r

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by whit3 ( 318913 )
      It IS a lot of memory for a 1989 machine (as old as the earliest WWW efforts),
      but entirely possible. There were two banks of four SIMM FPM memory modules,
      which came in 256k, 1M, 4M, and 16M sizes. One bank filled with16M, and
      one bank of 1M, gets you 68MB total.

      The available Ethernet ports, though, were only 10base200 or 10baseT. A
      low-end smartphone has better specs (but smaller screen).

  • First occurrence in a long, long time of a slashdotted server. Many years, in fact.

    It's a pitty Slashdot can only slashdot 16 MHz servers nowadays.

    • It's a pitty Slashdot can only slashdot 16 MHz servers nowadays.

      If we can take this down, we can probably crater a 486SLC2-66...

    • It's really, really hard to bring down a server with real user load these days, since everything is hosted in auto-expand clusters.
  • There is a C64 based website.. I did the same on my old Commodore Amiga 1200 with a 16bit pcmcia ethernet card.. http://oldservers.ddns.net/ind... [ddns.net]

    • Wow, that's incredible. I thought for sure it would be Slashdotted, but the page came up for me. Of course, it was like browsing the web on a 56k modem. Nice trip down memory lane, that.

  • If you perhaps ran it through Cloudflare, with Amazon Aurora for the backend - and maybe host the front-end on another server in a load-balanced kind of way - then I could see the Mac easily holding its own.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by nadass ( 3963991 )
      That's like saying, "if your entire website ran through load-balanced globally-redundant CDNs and only ran readily-cacheable static content... then it would easily survive a sustained multi-gigabit DDOS attack."

  • The same amount of money you spent on reviving this obsolete piece of junk could have bought a Beowulf cluster of Arduinos which would stand up quite well to whatever Slashdot can muster up these days, and the running costs would also be lower.

  • Many C64's, hell even TI-99/4A's, serve web pages these days. I won't link to them because that would probably kill them but if you search you can find them. This is 40+ year-old tech.

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • A lot will depend on what you're serving up. I would suspect that if it's a few static pages with no large images (or none at all), and no server-side scripting - which appears to be the case for these websites hosted on very old hardware, you could get away with some pretty old hardware. I would think your Celeron 300A would be fine, and your Opteron wouldn't even break a sweat. Now throw in a full-blown webserver like Apache, something like php, and a bunch of media and all bets would be off.

      On the oth

    • Or what's the most expensive hardware that could NOT survive a slashdotting? Apple watch? Tesla car computer?

  • worked as expected?
    Decades later it still works.
    The SE/30 was always a great computer with its PDS slot.
    Color, networking.

  • The Mac in the article is quite a bit more powerful than many early web servers. Keep in mind than many IOT devices have built in web interfaces with ony simple embedded CPUs.

  • My favorite computer (Score:3)

    by realkiwi ( 23584 ) on Monday August 12, 2019 @01:37AM (#59078108)

    The SE/30 is on the top of the list of my favorite computers.

  • Please post some photos and a chronology! I have an SE/30 just waiting to be put to use in a similar project!

  • a Beowulf cluster of these?

  • I'm surprised the user base here is still large enough to even take down that web server. We haven't taken down a server anywhere in years, and I'll be surprised if we ever take down a non-hobbyist server again before this site itself shuts down for good.
  • The maximum RAM for an Macintosh SE/30 is 4 MB. My first Web site was hosted on a 640K PC clone. Early Web servers were very light weight.

    • Maximum RAM for a Macintosh SE is indeed 4 MB. 4 slots for 30-pin SIMMs, either 256K or 1 MB each. It also ran an 8 MHz 68000 processor.

      The Macintosh SE/30 is an entirely different beast, having 8 SIMM slots (two banks of 4), and able to use 256K, 1 MB, 4 MB, or 16 MB SIMMs. And a 16 MHz 68030 processor.

  • Subject says it all.
  • It was an aspirational machine when I was a student. I used a 2nd hand mac 512k with 2 400k floppies back then. My friend got an se/30 and we were amazed how much difference the maths coprocessor made. Splendid machine. Sometimes I think about finding a broken compact mac like the se30 and put a raspberry pi in together with an lcd screen.

  • Turning an SE/30 into a linux box was little bit of a thing about a decade ago. Around this time I ran an Apple Network Server ANS/200mhz using Yellowdog Linux, a PPC based linux distro that shuttered in 2012.
    http://www.ydl.net/board/
    Back then you could shoehorn the distro onto a SE/30. It was about the earliest mac that you could do much of anything with. I think it was the first mac to have an ethernet board available (10baseT!) so anything else would need to run a PPP connection to networked PC or serial

  • Just visited the site and left a comment. Nice to have a real geeky tech story on slashdot for a change. Might have to dig out my SE/30 and do this myself. I wonder how performance would be if you upgraded to the max 128mb?

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