Retro Markus 🇩🇰🇩🇪#retrocomputing #vintagecomputing #search #searchengine #frogFind #novell #netware #icebrowser
Catch of the Day: Surfing in the Server Room! 🦖💾
Hey Retro Fans and IT Veterans!
Sometimes our FrogFind radar catches exotics that make even hardcore system administrators rub their eyes in disbelief. Forget old handhelds or consoles—today we are diving deep into the flickering neon lights of the corporate server rooms of the early 2000s.
Our bouncer logged this majestic user agent:
Mozilla/5.0 (NetWare; U; NetWare 6.50.08; en-US) ICEbrowser/6.1.2 NovellViewPort/3.7.2
For anyone who entered IT after 1995: We are talking about Novell NetWare 6.5! This was not a system for browsing or gaming. NetWare was the undisputed file and print server operating system that practically kept every corporate network running back in the day. An absolute workhorse.
But how does a NetWare server end up on FrogFind? The answer lies in the ICEbrowser tag. To display help files or the "Novell Remote Manager" directly at the server rack on the graphical emergency console, Novell had embedded a tiny, Java-written browser from ICEsoft. It was never intended to explore the open World Wide Web!
The fact that now, over 20 years later, someone is literally (or via remote connection) sitting in front of this server legend, opening the graphical console, hijacking the rudimentary Java help viewer, and using it to ping FrogFind is absolute top-tier retro computing. FrogFind delivers even to this pure server operating system the bare HTML it needs to read today's world.
Cheers to the unknown admin keeping this server alive! May your disk arrays never fail.
Your FrogFind Team 🐸
restorante
MidgePhoto
David Cantrell 🏏
Alecia Batson (she/her)
Colin
Wossen Wyatt 🇬🇾🐧💿💾
Micheal Shallop 🐧