Mastodawn

What platforms were used in the 80s up to about 1993 or 1994 for Internet servers? It can be #FTP, #Gopher, #telnet, #USENET, the #OldWeb, or anything else that was on the Internet in that era.

My research indicates Solaris was very popular for web servers until Linux took over, and so I suspect it (and SunOS before it) was very popular for the Internet in general, but I'd like to hear from anyone with this sort of experience.

#retrocomputing

vintage screwlisp account Apr 8, 2024

@sinza No #CHAOSNET ?

Binder🅅 Apr 8, 2024

@sinza lots of sun and dec

Colin Macleod Apr 8, 2024

@sinza I was sysadmin in a UK university CS dept back then. We didn't get any kind of internet connection until about 1992-3. The first generally-available web browser, NCSA Mosaic, was only launched in 1993 and took a few more years to become widespread - https://home.cern/science/computing/birth-web/short-history-web . So I would say that period was not so much "oldweb" as pre-web. Even usenet, which existed before the internet, was still very slow and limited.
#retrocomputing

A short history of the Web

CERN

Josh Justice Apr 8, 2024

@CGM @sinza I date the origin of the web by Marathon, the Mac FPS game. It was released in December 1994, and I know in 1995 I was browsing rudimentary web pages to download Marathon maps, texture packs, etc.

vga256 Apr 8, 2024

@CodingItWrong haha i have a similar world wide web dating system - for me, it was Ultima VIII: Pagan in 1994. the first thing i did was use lynx to find a text walkthrough for the game, which progressed to searching for Ultima IX screenshots in Mosaic and Netscape a few months later.

FRANK.MCCONNEL Apr 8, 2024

@sinza OK so late 1989 to 1996 when it was acquired by Attachmate I worked for The Wollongong Group. Usenet was C news with NNTP on a VAX 11/785 running 4.3BSD, later on a DECstation 3100 running Ultrix. When we put up a public web server ca 1994/5 it was on SunOS 4 on a Sun VMEbus system that I think had been board-swapped from Sun 3 to Sun 4 by then.

The astute reader will notice something absent from my list: TWG's products.

FRANK.MCCONNEL Apr 8, 2024

@sinza Good question what ISPs ran in the early 1990s. I think I remember reading that Netcom ran SCO Unix at first and switched to Suns. a2i was Suns (SunOS 4) with movement toward Linux.

FRANK.MCCONNEL Apr 8, 2024

@sinza Then there's WSMR-SIMTEL20.ARMY.MIL, the system whose FTP service gave its name to the Simtel archive of MS-DOS software. (It had other stuff too.) It was definitely 36-bit DEC iron and I think ran TOPS-20.

FRANK.MCCONNEL Apr 8, 2024

@sinza If I understand the history correctly, WorldWideWeb was a NeXTStep client application that was both a browser and a creator/editor. The server was more portable and I gather Tim B-L had got it running not only on NeXTStep but also on VM/CMS. There was some trouble getting it running on SLAC's VM/CMS system due to differences in OS, TCP/IP, and/or C toolchain version but this was accomplished by mid-December 1991.

FRANK.MCCONNEL Apr 8, 2024

@sinza I started out saying things about The Wollongong Group and I wanted to come back to that. In 1990 most of their business was TCP/IP stacks and clients and services and the primary clients and services were FTP, Telnet, and SMTP for e-mail.

FRANK.MCCONNEL Apr 8, 2024

@sinza I was not the originator, but supported WIN/TCP for MPE/V, which was in considerable portion ports of the 4BSD Telnet and FTP clients and services to classic HP 3000s running MPE V/E and HP's "NS Transport" TCP/IP stack.

Yes, it had customers, but most of them weren't the kinds of sites that wanted their 3000s to be on the big-I (public) Internet. There was a lot of that going on, customers wanted TCP/IP, but for interoperability between systems on their own networks.

FRANK.MCCONNEL Apr 9, 2024

@sinza Am yet trying and failing to remember the incantation used with a 4BSD FTP client to get a "binary" file full of 8-bit bytes for CP/M or MS-DOS from TOPS-20; the Internet used to be more interesting in some ways

Jeff Apr 9, 2024

@sinza BSD is the elephant in the room. 4BSD for the 80s and early 90s, particularly 4.3BSD, with BSD/OS and 386BSD having some traction at the end of the period. 4BSD was the development platform for TCP/IP in the 80s. SunOS (up to 4.x) was Sun Microsystem's version of BSD. (NetBSD and FreeBSD forked from 386BSD and 4.4BSD in 1993, but only really caught on later in the 90s, and thanks to USL v BSDi, got eclipsed by Linux.)

Peter N. M. Hansteen Apr 9, 2024

@sinza During the 80s, likely VAXes running some BSD variety, also some Sun kit. Moving into the 90s, some sort of TCP/IP was available for more systems, but still BSDs or derivatives mostly. Linux only really started catching on later. And notably ft.cdrom.com, *the* download site back then, was *one* (rather beefy for its time) FreeBSD box.

idlestate's SDF liason acct May 9, 2024

I ran NCSA httpd with IRIX on an SGI circa 1994 give or take.

Summer of 1989 someone showed me how to use BITNET to connect to other campuses, on a terminal connected to the campus VAX running VMS.

I dialed in, but soon learned how to use telnet to connect to the WELL, which at the time (circa 1991?) was running DYNIX on Sequent hardware.