A website hosted on a floppy disk (Be patient while it's loading)

https://old.bigcat.space/

by mans82 • 5 years ago

135 106 5 years ago

old.bigcat.space

yowza• 5 years ago

I remember making websites in Frontpage and uploading them to Geocities.

commandnotfound• 5 years ago

Error 503 is intended?

smogblock• 5 years ago

no it's just down from too much traffic

jhgb• 5 years ago

So...what is the 503 page served from, then? ;)

yosito• 5 years ago

I'm imagining that the HN hug of death will literally set the floppy disks on fire.

r0fl• 5 years ago

I almost spit my coffee out this morning because of this :)

ricardo81• 5 years ago

Guess the ~1MB (probably less) is deliberately not paged into memory, HTTP 503 for me just now.

john-doe• 5 years ago

Having images was a bit too optimistic I guess, ASCII drawings would have been more appropriate.

laputan_machine• 5 years ago

Not sure how this works unless somehow (how?) deliberately disabling writes to memory. Not going to survive HN HoD.

barelysapient• 5 years ago

I can't in good conscious click the link.

omgmajk3• 5 years ago

Reminds me of that blog/magazine who went fully solar and stopped thinking about uptime. What a time to be alive.

https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/

AshamedCaptain3• 5 years ago

Next: a website that loads from punched cards!

Where to stop?

teitoklien• 5 years ago

Surely a website that doesn’t exist but is left to the imagination of the reader

Is the final stop

CTOSian3• 5 years ago

Punched tape (on loop) would be more suitable :)

superjan• 5 years ago

An actual Turing machine maybe? I’m someone built one by now.

errcorrectcode3• 5 years ago

Eniac or Babbage Difference Engine doing HTTP/2.0. I can't remember if both are Turing complete, so it's an exercise for the maker.

hdjjhhvvhga• 5 years ago

Unfortunately it is not fully solar - it is as far as it can go, but then it is connected to a home router connected to mains etc.

madaxe_again• 5 years ago

I do have a fully solar powered VPN gateway/LTE router/web server/Wi-Fi relay - in my case, it’s out of necessity, as I live in a deep valley, and the only way I could get internet access here was to stick a mast on top of a hill with an IP67 box of goodies and a solar panel and battery, and an LPDA and yagi antenna for LTE and 802.11n respectively. The web server isn’t public, but fulfils a few important functions for me.

johnchristopher3• 5 years ago

If you want to nitpick go all the way.

It's fully solar because a long time ago the sun got hot and the solar system got put together and that combination resulted in life and then later some sample of that life built a website with materials extracted from what the sun did to the original mess.

phh• 5 years ago

Which reminds me of a catastrophe movie, where all countries launched all their nukes, and earth became radioactively poisoned. A submarine survived, looking for signs of life, and they received sporadic messages like "the whales are fine" (which made sense to them since whales live under-water). They went to the origin of the signal, only to find a computer turning on and off because of its solar panel, sending messages at every boot.

whoibrar• 5 years ago

This would be an interesting watch, I tried searching but couldn't find it, can you share the name of the movie?

CTOSian3• 5 years ago

oh crap... now I had some sort of flashback from Fallout 4 (Yangtze) :)

Thanks guys for sharing the link of the movie.

KineticLensman• 5 years ago

They went to the origin of the signal, only to find a computer turning on and off because of its solar panel, sending messages at every boot.

In the original film [0] and book, the signal is caused by a soda-bottle being knocked by a window-blind against a Morse-code telegraph key.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Beach_(1959_film)

omgmajk3• 5 years ago

Which sort of reminds me of SOMA.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soma_(video_game)

Hokusai• 5 years ago

Location: Barcelona

That is interesting as in winter and summer you will get a noticeable difference in availability. It varies between 9 and 15 hours of sun a day.

c0balt• 5 years ago

Now just span across multiple sun availability zones and ensure the local sun harvesting is redundant for a HA setup ^^

davidandgoliath• 5 years ago

This is amazing.

errcorrectcode3• 5 years ago

Nice! Next step: an Arduino website run from ambient RF energy harvesting. :))

emaro• 5 years ago

Which reminds me of the http://solarprotocol.net/ I stumbled up on earlier today. It' a network of solar powered servers and the content of the site is delivered by the peer with the most sunshine.

charcircuit3• 5 years ago

Couldn't you cache the entire site? The speed of the floppy shouldn't matter that much.

rightbyte2• 5 years ago

That would remove the fun wouldn't it? I want to believe there is that crunching floppy sound when I press a link.

charcircuit3• 5 years ago

I've never used a floppy disk before so I wouldn't know that sound. I think making sure your site fits on it could be a challenge.

smhenderson• 5 years ago

I think that would defeat the point - one of the items on his site "feature" list says :

Xitami web server, because it's the only one that does no caching at all, so the website is always served fresh from the floppy.

So I think it's more about proving what you can do with old software/hardware when you put your mind to it...

charcircuit3• 5 years ago

If you wanted to prove that, wouldn't you want to make it scale to handle HN traffic. I'm sure it would be possible.

pawelwentpawel• 5 years ago

Error 503 unfortunately. I promise I was patient.

Once back in the early 2000s I connected the floppy drive incorrectly and the entire thing melted inside with some smoke. It was rather funny at the time, mostly because it wasn't my computer. That said, I'm hoping bigcat.space r&d headquarters are not on fire and the website will be back up soon :)

redleader55• 5 years ago

I am curious about the reliability of this media - how many requests until the floppy is busted. Can the website owner comment on this?

kroltan• 5 years ago

F5 and a tally!

hnlmorg• 5 years ago

I published my first website in 1994 via floppy disk.

I didn't have the internet at home so would design the website there, save to floppy disk, then go to the local library that had internet terminals you could hire for an hour. From there I'd upload the website from floppy disk.

brazzy• 5 years ago

I did the same in 1996 (hosting at my univesity). On an Amiga. Which didn't even have a TCP/IP stack (I think you could get a commercial implementation).

kingcharles• 5 years ago

I found one of my earliest web sites from 1996 on a floppy not long ago. It was surprisingly awesome.

garou• 5 years ago

https://web.archive.org/web/20220120092324/https://old.bigca... Not on a floppy disk but kills the curiosity

akuji1993• 5 years ago

Aaaaaand it's gone.

severak_cz• 5 years ago

Pragmatic approach would be host it from floppy disk, but have some caching proxy before it. It could cache into RAM, most modern machines have enough memory to cache many many many floppies. Even Raspberry Pi.

colonwqbang2• 5 years ago

This is exactly what Linux will do by default, without any special setup or config. Everything goes through the buffer cache.

In fact, you would have to do active work to disable the caching.

colejohnson66• 5 years ago

Don’t all modern operating systems have a RAM-based disk cache?

account42• 5 years ago

The pragmatic approach would be to not host it from a floppy. If you are going to host it on a floppy then just having it all constantly in cache somewhat defeats the point.

jraedisch• 5 years ago

You need somewhere to persist writes from those CGI scripts.

wmitty• 5 years ago

The website says that he uses:

"Xitami web server, because it's the only one that does no caching at all, so the website is always served fresh from the floppy."

Source: https://web.archive.org/web/20220120092324/https://old.bigca...

jandrese• 5 years ago

I was wondering how he prevented the kernel from caching the disk blocks in memory, but then I saw he is running it on a machine with 4MB of main memory, and presumably most of that is eaten up by the TCP stack, web server, and parallel ethernet drivers. Not to mention memory needed by the OS itself.

Even more surprising, his page isn't just pretty, it is functional! You can get a copy of the demo for Wolfenstein 3D off of the site (supposedly, I did not try).

iso16312• 5 years ago

It's hosted on a machine with 4M of ram on windows 3.11, and specifically uses a web server which doesn't use caching (And I don't think Dos 6 caches files at the OS level, at least by default)

AshamedCaptain3• 5 years ago

DOS does: https://home.csulb.edu/~murdock/buffers.html

HPsquared• 5 years ago

I'll check back in a couple of weeks...

zfxfr2• 5 years ago

Unsurprisingly I got a 503 error. I'll be more curious how many requests it can handle if it is really only on floppy (no caching etc..). 1.44 MB is plenty of space to host a nice website !

hooby2• 5 years ago

Are you asking about how many requests per second - or about how many request per floppy (before that needs replacing)? ;)

mrmattyboy2• 5 years ago

Yeh, if it is down, it's sad that the HN effect has caused the death of a floppy or floppy drive :( haha

zfxfr2• 5 years ago

Yes sorry, I meant I'll be curious to know how many requests per second that floppy can handle. Well for sure it's not enough for instance since I still get 503 :). Since I am curious so I'll just bookmark for next time.

CTOSian3• 5 years ago

are we talking about the same site ? as the pages on the archive org version say: "The specs: .... a 256MB IDE Disk on Module."

Shamii• 5 years ago

Linux had page cache for a while. Not sure what this should show.

Independently can we pls stop using floppy disks to show how slow, fast, small or big something else is in comparison?

I haven't had a floppy disk in my hands for 19 years and they were shitty 2000 already.

I also guess even less people are even getting anything out of floppy disk comparisons.

sodimel• 5 years ago

A gif just loaded[0]! That means that the computer is alive, and the floppy still somewhat works. No luck in trying the homepage.

[0] https://old.bigcat.space/278062.gif - here it is for the curious: https://imgur.com/a/AfcEnRw

edit: the website just loaded, but not the images. It's still alive.

boogies• 5 years ago

Second link minus JS: https://imgin.voidnet.tech/a/AfcEnRw

whoomp12342• 5 years ago

error 503.F0064 : floppy disk ejected

lopis• 5 years ago

Best viewed in uwutscape navigator at 640x480 or something

This is not true. It shows horizontal scroll at this resolution. Absolutely unusable in my 15" CRT.

rovr138• 5 years ago

Having had small CRT monitors, I can't tell if this is true or trolling.

EGreg• 5 years ago

"Service Unavailable"

Can someone re-insert the disk please??

hobomatic• 5 years ago

This may not be enough. They may have to click open the window a few times and blow on it

Omnius• 5 years ago

Someone needs to flip it over mid load.

mdbauman• 5 years ago

https://archive.ph/YEv1x This archive from 03:58 has several of the images.

margofx• 5 years ago

503 Service Unavailable - is there any screenshot of the website itself? I'd like to check it out.

marginalia_nu• 5 years ago

Don't copy that floppy!

andai3• 5 years ago

What is causing the 503 errors? Could the server be reconfigured with eg. a longer timeout to avoid them? (On that note, is there a limit to maximum timeout on the client-side?) Or is the actual hardware getting overwhelmed by the traffic?

andai3• 5 years ago

The whole machine only has 4MB of RAM so presumably at some point requests start getting dropped. Then again, you can store a lot of requests in even 1MB.

sam0x17• 5 years ago

Considering this is on HN, I'm just going to assume it won't load if I click haha.

errcorrectcode3• 5 years ago

Install Super PC-Kwik, smartdrv, or run it from a CF/USB emulator. Problem solved. ;-)

masswerk• 5 years ago

Fun fact: Loading from 3.5" floppy disk used to be a good V.34 simulator.

tluyben2• 5 years ago

When I ran my BBS in the 80s, it was hosted on an 8 bit machine with 2 3.5 drives; however the BBS software itself which included all pages of the ‘site’ where on a ram disk of 256kb so they would load ‘instantly’. The 2 disks contained (weekly refreshed) public domain software and demos.

Now I am curious if I put it online (I still have the machine) how it would work. Seems fun to do.

gleventhal• 5 years ago

and, surprise! It's down. "I stored my knapsack in my toilet, and look: it's wet".

A website hosted on a floppy disk (Be patient while it's loading)

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