There exist, in various pockets of the World Wide Web, dark corners in which vintage machines are tucked, quietly whirring away as they make occasional contact with the outside world. This loose confederation of devices constitutes a New Old Web, composed of computers previously considered useless or obsolete.

Serving HTTP from vintage computers is nothing new — it’s been link fodder since the dawn of the public Internet — but I’d like to highlight a wonderful website that maintains a directory of vintage Apple computers functioning as working web servers.

It’s called The Old Apple Web Server Directory, and within it lie dusty nuggets of classic webitude like Grant Hutchinson’s Hot Newton Server Action (running on an Apple Newton PDA), Todd VerBeek’s Mac SE Web Server (via a SCSI Ethernet adapter), and, of course, the classic Mac Plus Web Server, which serves up pages straight from a 3 1/2″ floppy disk.

There’s plenty more where that came from in the Directory, including a Lisa 2 web server (in Mac mode, sadly), and more high-end affairs like a IIci running Apache on NetBSD and a Mac LC 475 tucked into a desk drawer. Feel free to explore the Directory’s collection of links and find your own favorites (the 68030 section is especially interesting).

The Web World Beyond Apple

It’s hard to find practitioners of vintage web serving more enthusiastic than the Mac faithful. But in this wooly Web of ours, you’ll also run across web servers chugging away on other makes and models of machines, like Commodores, Ataris, and beyond. Whether you’re a Mac fan or not, please share some of your favorite web server links with us.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 15th, 2008 at 5:54 pm and is filed under Hacks & Projects, Macintosh, Vintage Computing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.