sinzaApr 8, 2024

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

Show threadFRANK.MCCONNELApr 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.

Show threadFRANK.MCCONNELApr 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.
Show threadFRANK.MCCONNELApr 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.
Show threadFRANK.MCCONNEL
@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.
Apr 8, 2024 at 6:41pmWeb
Show threadFRANK.MCCONNELApr 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.
Show threadFRANK.MCCONNELApr 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.