[COFF] The Web Service on Minnie is 30 Years Old Today

[Wesley Parish]

Love those story manglings. "Prunella's Lustful Murderous Haiku Went 
Sailing In Terror" - makes as much sense as much we see on the news!

Wesley Parish

On 20/02/24 08:59, Warren Toomey via COFF wrote:
> On Wed Feb 23 16:33, 1994, I turned on the web service on my machine
> "minnie", originally minnie.cs.adfa.edu.au, now minnie.tuhs.org (aka
> www.tuhs.org). The web service has been running continuously for thirty
> years, except for occasional downtimes and hardware/software upgrades.
>
> I think this makes minnie one of the longest running web services
> still in existence :-)
>
> For your enjoyment, I've restored a snapshot of the web site from
> around mid-1994. It is visible at https://minnie.tuhs.org/94Web/
> Some hyperlinks are broken.
>
> ## Web Logs
>
> The web logs show me testing the service locally on Feb 23 1994,
> with the first international web fetches on Feb 26:
>
> ```
> sparcserve.cs.adfa.oz.au [Wed Feb 23 16:33:13 1994] GET / HTTP/1.0
> sparcserve.cs.adfa.oz.au [Wed Feb 23 16:33:18 1994] GET /BSD.html HTTP/1.0
> sparcserve.cs.adfa.oz.au [Wed Feb 23 16:33:20 1994] GET /Images/demon1.gif HTTP/1.0
> ...
> estcs1.estec.esa.nl [Sat Feb 26 01:48:21 1994] GET /BSD-info/BSD.html HTTP/1.0
> estcs1.estec.esa.nl [Sat Feb 26 01:48:30 1994] GET /BSD-info/Images/demon1.gif HTTP/1.0
> estcs1.estec.esa.nl [Sat Feb 26 01:49:46 1994] GET /BSD-info/cdrom.html HTTP/1.0
> shazam.cs.iastate.edu [Sat Feb 26 06:31:20 1994] GET /BSD-info/BSD.html HTTP/1.0
> shazam.cs.iastate.edu [Sat Feb 26 06:31:24 1994] GET /BSD-info/Images/demon1.gif HTTP/1.0
> dem0nmac.mgh.harvard.edu [Sat Feb 26 06:32:04 1994] GET /BSD-info/BSD.html HTTP/1.0
> dem0nmac.mgh.harvard.edu [Sat Feb 26 06:32:10 1994] GET /BSD-info/Images/demon1.gif HTTP/1.0
> ```
>
> ## Minnie to This Point
>
> Minnie originally started life in May 1991 as an FTP server running KA9Q NOS
> on an IBM XT with a 30M RLL disk, see https://minnie.tuhs.org/minannounce.txt
>
> By February 1994 Minnie was running FreeBSD 1.0e on a 386DX25 with 500M
> of disk space, 8M of RAM and a 10Base2 network connection. I'd received a copy
> of the BSDisc Vol.1 No.1 in December 1993. According to the date on the file
> `RELNOTES.FreeBSD` on the CD, FreeBSD 1.0e was released on Oct 28 1993.
>
> ## The Web Server
>
> I'd gone to a summer conference in Canberra in mid-February 1994 (see
> pg. 29 of https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Documentation/AUUGN/AUUGN-V15.1.pdf
> and https://minnie.tuhs.org/94Web/Canberra-AUUG/cauugs94.html, 10am)
> and I'd seen the Mosaic web browser in action. With FreeBSD running on
> minnie, it seemed like a good idea to set up a web server on her.
>
> NCSA HTTPd server v1.1 had been released at the end of Jan 1994, see
> http://1997.webhistory.org/www.lists/www-talk.1994q1/0282.html
> It was the obvious choice to be the web server on minnie.
>
> ## Minnie from Then to Now
>
> You can read more about minnie's history and her hardware/software
> evolution here: https://minnie.tuhs.org/minnie.html
>
> I obtained the "tuhs.org" domain in May 2000 and switched minnie's
> domain name from "minnie.cs.adfa.edu.au" to "minnie.tuhs.org".
>
> Cheers!
> 	Warren
>
> P.S. I couldn't wait until Friday to post this :-)