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

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

old.bigcat.space

135 pointsmans82128 comments

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 !

Are you asking about how many requests per second - or about how many request per floppy (before that needs replacing)? ;)

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.

Yeh, if it is down, it's sad that the HN effect has caused the death of a floppy or floppy drive :( haha

are we talking about the same site ? as the pages on the archive org version say: "The specs: .... a 256MB IDE Disk on Module."

I imagine the OS is on the IDE disk and the floppy disk contains the files for the website

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.

Second link minus JS: https://imgin.voidnet.tech/a/AfcEnRw

> 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.

Having had small CRT monitors, I can't tell if this is true or trolling.

https://archive.ph/YEv1x This archive from 03:58 has several of the images.

I can't in good conscious click the link.

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.

I found one of my earliest web sites from 1996 on a floppy not long ago. It was surprisingly awesome.

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).

Guess the ~1MB (probably less) is deliberately not paged into memory, HTTP 503 for me just now.

Having images was a bit too optimistic I guess, ASCII drawings would have been more appropriate.

I'm imagining that the HN hug of death will literally set the floppy disks on fire.

I almost spit my coffee out this morning because of this :)

Considering this is on HN, I'm just going to assume it won't load if I click haha.

I am curious about the reliability of this media - how many requests until the floppy is busted. Can the website owner comment on this?

F5 and a tally!

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 :)

https://web.archive.org/web/20220120092324/https://old.bigca... Not on a floppy disk but kills the curiosity

Couldn't you cache the entire site? The speed of the floppy shouldn't matter that much.

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...

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.

That would remove the fun wouldn't it? I want to believe there is that crunching floppy sound when I press a link.

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.

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.

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.

You could store about 240,000 words, or about 2-3 novels.

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.

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...

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).

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.

You need somewhere to persist writes from those CGI scripts.

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.

Don’t all modern operating systems have a RAM-based disk cache?

I don't have deep knowledge of any other operating system. But I'm sure you are right.

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)

DOS does: https://home.csulb.edu/~murdock/buffers.html

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

As said in that page and the documentation, the read-ahead is the [,X] part, which is actually disabled by default in every DOS past 6.x (incl FreeDOS). The first part is the number of primary buffers which is indeed "for keeping recently read data in RAM".

Smartdrv, like Fastopen, just allows disk buffers to survive a Close File call. Normally DOS only does close-to-open consistency i.e. buffers are flushed on close. Smartdrv specifically also allows write-back rather than write-through.

And, anyway: yes, Smartdrv is enabled by default in 6.x installs with enough memory.

Okay, thanks for the clarification.

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

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.

error 503.F0064 : floppy disk ejected

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?

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.

I remember making websites in Frontpage and uploading them to Geocities.

"Service Unavailable"

Can someone re-insert the disk please??

This may not be enough. They may have to click open the window a few times and blow on it

Someone needs to flip it over mid load.

I'll check back in a couple of weeks...

Not sure how this works unless somehow (how?) deliberately disabling writes to memory. Not going to survive HN HoD.

503 Service Unavailable - is there any screenshot of the website itself? I'd like to check it out.

Don't copy that floppy!

Install Super PC-Kwik, smartdrv, or run it from a CF/USB emulator. Problem solved. ;-)

Fun fact: Loading from 3.5" floppy disk used to be a good V.34 simulator.

and, surprise! It's down. "I stored my knapsack in my toilet, and look: it's wet".

Aaaaaand it's gone.

Error 503 is intended?

no it's just down from too much traffic

So...what is the 503 page served from, then? ;)

Probably a reverse proxy running on a modern machine, for security.

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/

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.

> 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)

This would be an interesting watch, I tried searching but couldn't find it, can you share the name of the movie?

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/

Brilliant book too! Well worth a read.

Which sort of reminds me of SOMA.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soma_(video_game)

oh crap... now I had some sort of flashback from Fallout 4 (Yangtze) :)

Thanks guys for sharing the link of the movie.

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.

Next: a website that loads from punched cards!

Where to stop?

Surely a website that doesn’t exist but is left to the imagination of the reader

Is the final stop

https://www.zombo.com/

Happy to see it converted from the old flash applet.

I have one like that. It contains pictures of cats.

Pictures of Schroedinger cats, I presume?

Maybe.

Yes and no at the same time

I'm pretty sure that website exists.

> Surely a website that doesn’t exist but is left to the imagination of the reader

A startup looking for funding, full circle

That's what I just experienced. They should probably upgrade to a zip drive.

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.

Punched tape (on loop) would be more suitable :)

An actual Turing machine maybe? I’m someone built one by now.

Some people even built one in Lego http://rubens.ens-lyon.fr/

> 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.

Now just span across multiple sun availability zones and ensure the local sun harvesting is redundant for a HA setup ^^

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.

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.

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.

this sounds really cool

Some more info:

https://gallatinhamradio.com/repeaters/BozemanAreaRepeaters.... <- 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.

Cool. Do you have a writeup of what you made and how?

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.

Nitpick++: A fair percentage of electricity in the world is powered by other stars, because Uranium didn’t come from our star.

Ah, coool. But it's still fair to say it's solar powered, right ? Just not our sun ?

Not really. The transuranics are believed to be mostly created during supernovas (core-collapse supernova nucleosynthesis) and neutron star mergers.

Those events are not particularly similar to our sun's normal solar radiation.

I think you are grasping at straws (although I'll be honest I don't know what that literally means). And I think the word solar really only applies to our own sun.

Thanks for the explanation :).

> I think you are grasping at straws (although I'll be honest I don't know what that literally means).

Yup, I tried all I could ^^.

> And I think the word solar really only applies to our own sun.

So be it then. In scifi they always talked about sol-3 anyway and caspix-9, etc..

Nice! Next step: an Arduino website run from ambient RF energy harvesting. :))

This is amazing.

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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