Ask HN: Early "pizza box" computers compared to modern (mini) PCs as servers? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Early "pizza box" computers compared to modern (mini) PCs as servers?

2 pointshedgehog04 comments

Hi everyone,

I was reading that latest Elon Musk book some weeks ago, in which it’s mentioned in one of his early ventures, he used “pizza box” computers as servers, I believe they should be some SPARC stations.

So I looked into Wikipedia and checked out their specs. No doubt that ordinary home PCs today are much powerful than these pizza box servers.

So I was wondering that since people could use these “pizza box computers”, e.g. SPARC stations, to host web services/apps towards customers 20 years ago or so. Does it mean that even with mini PCs or home PCs (say, with Linux or BSD) of today, we can host similar number of users with much cheaper hardware?

Or would you say that “pizza box” servers have some kinds of special points that normal home PC/computers that usually do not have? Given that web apps have become much more complexity, say with Rails or Django, so we need more powerful hardwares?

Thank you very much!

Yes, you can still host cool things with minimal hardware.

a Raspberry Pi serves my websites from the shelf over my desk. It does nothing challenging, but its specs are multiples of those of the systems Musk was talking about.

That doesn't mean you can throw down a full fat "modern software stack" on the Pi and expect success any more than you would if you did that to a Sparc10. Elon was bragging about writing C code to do things that modern developers would implement only with layers of abstractions. Databases, cache servers, load balancers, layers of complexity and indirection that are of debatable utility when the focus is on "push bits out fast"... and for the most part hadn't been invented yet then, anyway.

Thank you for your input! I always considered a Raspberry Pi, though I bought an Arduino first last night……

With sufficient and appropriate configs, how many users do you think a Pi can serve at the same time, say, with Rails or Django?

I also agree with you on that many things were not invented or appeared during those early time, and C (or Common Lisp) was common choices than say Ruby or Python.

Also, what would you say about the advantages of hosting yourself, compared to say fly.io or similar services? For instance Docker or container seems to “the way” right now? I’m relatively new to web dev…

I'm old school; i don't do Rails or Django; I've got a mod_python on my apache but I haven't used "in anger" yet; all im serving now is static HTML.

However, previously I served several thousand users daily over a span of some years using a dual Pentium with 128MB of RAM and 6GB of spinning rust hard disk. Using earlier versions of the same software stack. Most of that traffic could be characterized as "static" as well.

The prime advantage of self hosting for me is editorial control. Hosted elsewhere, who knows when an opinion previously expressed becomes "problematic." If I manage to really piss someone off; they'll have a slightly larger amount of trouble having my site taken down than the usual single complaint to a service provider.

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