Post #3965683

2026-07-20 12:57 UTC

@aredridel@kolektiva.social i always find it confusing when people talk about the past because I was a much younger programmer then, and I could not figure out how to make websites more complex than a basic html page, so I don't really have positive associations with it a few questions: re 'throw it on the university file server' - is the idea that you could keep using the university file server even after you left the university? indefinitely?

Replies (2)

@aredridel@kolektiva.social 2026-07-20 13:19

@b0rk@social.jvns.ca Yes! God the early web was SO WEIRD this way. Servers were at once cheap and expensive: running your own was a matter of stable internet and a spare computer, but stable internet was hard to come by (this is the era of dial-up); universities were reliably fast internet, thanks to efforts like Internet2 and other connectivity programs. Students set up servers in dorms. Grad students and professors often had a box under a desk somewhere, serving pages. IP addresses were real IPs, too, 18.57.23.45 for example, just open to the internet. No NAT, no 192.168.x.y addresses. You just ran Apache and a Linux server and you were off to the races. If you were diligent you turned off sendmail so people wouldn't relay spam through your server. (this is the beginning of email server blacklists!) A friend of mine has been excising the last of these things at MIT the last couple years. Like, in 2025, this was still a thing. (A demand for all university web resources to be properly accessible, and have good certificates has driven this. End of an era.) Many web servers were configured so that http://domain.name/~username/ was mapped to ~/public_html on the server. All you needed was an FTP client and a text editor to write some HTML. No git, no cloud, just a username and password. (And on some badly configured servers, of which there were many, anonymous FTP and writing to some public web directory... or abusing photo-upload CGI scripts to write to the directory they were in) It was very common for someone's ~ directory to outlive them, finally being removed when a server was de-provisioned or migrated to new hardware or in an OS upgrade gone wrong. You can still see this ethos in old unix nerds: https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/ for example (author of Putty, and many puzzle games). Still running on a server running apache and mod_perl in this case. Mine's using newer tech, but I have a server that I started in 1998 (though it's migrated hosts like 11 times and is now a cloud instance instead of being served on a 300kbps DSL circuit in my apartment in Oregon) that still has this: there's a reason my website is https://dinhe.net/~aredridel/ I'm thinking about going back to Apache. Caddy leaves a lot to be desired for this multi-user serving. And the thing about all of this is it was a fundamentally _shared_ experience, before everyone moved to commercial web hosts where the users didn't trust each other at all. I still have friends who share files by "throw it in /pub on the server."

Open ##3965682
@b0rk@social.jvns.ca 2026-07-20 13:01

@aredridel@kolektiva.social re HTTP Basic Auth - were people actually using HTTP Basic Auth in a serious way for access control? When was this? Was there an intention at some point that http basic auth become the "main" auth system people use? It feels hard for me to imagine.

Open ##4505568