edit 2: Here's a HP B-series PA-RISC from my closet running actual vintage NS-4, also no, http://i.imgur.com/tt7AYqj.png (the top window is a search for the term "cat")
Google however, almost still workshttp://i.imgur.com/kdTd1AU.png ... I give them an A. hn and kernel.org get a security algorithm error, reddit gets an i/o error as does craigslist and yahoo. wiki.c2.com has a perpetual spinner. netbsd here makes me sad to be such a fanboy: http://i.imgur.com/RxedDF6.png
c2 recently became obsessed with "federated wikis" apparently due to some unimpressed person threatening to batch-delete the entire site. Unfortunately JavaScript-based solutions became interesting.
I'm mildly curious what would happen if you tried to build NetSurf on that thing. It compiles for AmigaOS and RISC OS...
Looks like some serious effort. To put things in context, I can't do remote X to a modern machine as in
$ DISPLAY=desktop:0 xterm&
This gives a protocol error. So instead I'm running it all through a vncserver, which uses a more legacy protocol.
I've tried things like
$ Xnest -query hp :1
but I get the classic CDE hour glass, a black screen, and nothing more.
It's honestly nice to pull this thing out of the closet just to remember how unfriendly things used to be. You type a command and realize "well gee, this thing doesn't have that. Alright, here's a more painful way..." You don't even get things like arrow keys and backspace for free. Gotta stty them.
I must admit that I would _really_ love to have a go at this HP-UX box. I have some ideas about how to fix the X issues you mentioned, and getting remote CDE working to your normal X display would be awesome too.
To be completely fair, building NetSurf may simply not be possible with the toolchain the machine has - I was maybe-1/3-joking about trying it :P - but it would be an awesome challenge to see if it could be done. I suspect it may just be possible.
I believe it's relatively recent. I've heard second-hand from better men than me that they are dropping a lot of legacy things. As far as I can tell, the HP is running X11R5. It doesn't do -version, the man page is for R5 and the binary is dated "Oct 27 1997" ... so yeah, 20 years ago. It's honestly a reasonable thing to break.
I've never wanted to see a revenue graph more than that of Excite. I would suspect there would be a strong correlation with AOL dial-up subscription rates (perhaps causation too).
Simply making a version of X that loads on dialup is itself a market segment. Clone some popular websites but sacrafice everything.
Also I've long wanted an HTTP caching mechanism that permits cross origin caching, so people aren't redownloading the same dependencies. Essentially the server responds with a digest and if the browser has a match from any domain, it forgoes the download.
Is there a hard to trigger collision attack possible? Sure but I don't care.
Check the ' Top Concert Tickets' section and performers. Seems mainly for people wanting to stay in a former era, which is not bad as they get something they find useful. Also a fair bit about Home Security, Medical and Nursing, Online Schools and Criminal Justice. I think they have an audience.
Wow. This page is actually strangely appealing. It loads fast. I don't have to click off to another page to get the news headlines. Ads are restrained to just a couple square boxes.
> I'm going to start a new trend in web design. I'll call it 56k design.
That was pretty much my criteria when I was making forum software: https://www.lfgss.com/
It's still too heavy and slow, and there's still some things I could do better. But that's nitpicking, it's pretty good and when I finish re-structuring all of the code it will be a single binary install for those who want to use it, or a split-binary Web-UI + API for those who want to only do certain parts (i.e. customise and host the front-end and not care about the back-end, or to scale the background for heavy mobile use without that being serving front-end traffic).
My goals for that software in the next few months:
1. Same-origin everything
2. Eradicate as much JavaScript as possible (graceful degradation to the extreme)
3. What JavaScript cannot be eradicated, do natively (not using jQuery, etc)
4. Single codebase, single binary install from a single `go install` command
We've built the Thredded forums engine (https://thredded.org) with the same goals in mind. The entire CSS is 10KiB, JavaScript loads asynchronously and is optional.
Oh, people have already tried this. Very recently I think someone posted their website on here saying it was amazingly fast etc. Anyone who used the web back in the 90s just remembered it as how things used to be. A Google search was virtually instant over a 56k modem. Now it's noticeably laggy on a broadband connection. If you used Firefox then web pages started rendering the instant enough HTML had been downloaded. None of this waiting for the entire thing and then running over it all with Javascript to generate the "real" render.
Google owns this and they are giving it up, why? My guess is they dont make enough money this way (with search as a service). That is probably just a long term concern but an important one.
Yep, that's a good opportunity for them, for sure. I'd start calling up universities and get a foot in for exposure, list them as enterprise clients, etc.
