Commodore 64 Web server [video] | Hacker News Reader

Commodore 64 Web server [video]

youtube.com

70 pointskentricon11 comments

Since the page is only 4KB, why not cache it in RAM instead of reading from the floppy disk all the time?

Yep, agree. At least there is room for improvement, like caching at least the most frequently/popular pages and storing only less frequently visited pages.

For context: remarks are made at around 17:00 in the YT video.

Scaling looks like fun with this machine. Maybe adding REU to it would definitely help: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_REU

Also it seems that the server requires a special 6502 based OS, link is mentioned below the YT video: https://github.com/oliverschmidt/contiki

Neat! ... Here comes the hug of death in 3... 2... 1...

Hope it holds up!

Here's the link to the server:

http://c64-webserver.tplinkdns.com

It’s been about 20+ years since I last saw a webpage served by a humble C64. Amazingly, this one did indeed load after a few seconds. If it weren’t for the noise from loading the page from disk, I’d be tempted to set up my own at home.

I used to host a little site on an 8 bit homecomputer; it ran from a ramdisk so it would not load from floppy. I guess you will need to mod (mine was a Japanese machine with 256kb memory mapped memory which I controlled with a webserver (well… it could only do GET) written in Pascal & some z80 asm) by adding memory, but still, it would be fun. Let me dust off mine if I can find it and see if it still works.

Your comment made me buy a whopping 512kB GeoRAM expansion on eBay, just to be sure :)

If it weren’t for the noise from loading the page from disk, I’d be tempted to set up my own at home.

Running a BBS out of my bedroom with three 1541's and a 1571 taught me to sleep through anything.

It wasn't until much later that someone figured out a patch for the 1541 DOS that would keep it from dropping the head at each track between multiple track movements, making the drive almost silent. That would have been awesome.

My brain did a little twist seeing an ethernet cable going into a C64.

Poor little thing really can't handle web traffic from HN. (To be fair, plenty of contemporary Wordpress blogs can't, either.)

Cool. Now get it to run on an unexpanded 5KB VIC-20.

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