Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Running A Web Server On An Apple Lisa 2

Posted by timothy on from the walking-to-school-through-the-snow dept.

pinqkandi writes: "Saw this come along the MacHTTP discussion list; some one got an Apple Lisa 2 running a web server. Quite an impressive feat. Be quick to check it out - they expect to shut it down about 8am CST on 1/2/02."

5 of 266 comments (clear)

  1. It was a matter of time. by x136 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I've seen a server or two running on Mac Pluses (8MHz 68000 vs. the Lisa/Lisa2/MacXL's 5MHz 68000), some Classics (8MHz 68000), LCs (16MHz 68020) and SE/30s (16MHz 68030), but never a Lisa.

    Good show to whoever got it set up. Too bad it could never hope to handle a slashdotting...

    Believe it or not, Mac Pluses and other 68k Macs (running either MacHTTP or some form of 68k BSD) seem to make pretty good servers for sites with fairly low traffic (Not to mention cheap!). Of course, you'll never see Slashdot running on a Quadra. :)

    --
    SIGFEH
  2. No longer a Lisa! by freshmkr · · Score: 4, Interesting
    Mod the parent up! aberkvam's right, it's pretty much been modified to the point of not being a Lisa anymore. The square pixel screen modification alone is enough to keep it from running 7/7 (aka the Lisa Office System, the Lisa's groundbreaking OS), nevermind the CPU and memory modifications.

    This aside, it might not be impossible to get a stock Lisa 2 (or even a Lisa 1!) on the net. Microsoft (if you can believe it) had a version of Xenix for both Lisa models. One could potentially program some "http server" that operates over one of the serial lines or perhaps do something more baroque than that (e.g. implement serial line PPP+web server in user mode).

    If someone can find me a copy of Xenix on 5.25" Twiggy media and a spare ProFile external HD (5 megabytes!), I'll put my Lisa 1 on the net. Yes, I own one.

    I used to have a webpage about the Lisa. The server that held it (a 386) suffered an untimely demise after another administrator ran rm -rf /. Fortunately, you can still view the old content online with the help of the Internet Archive. Go here and here to see some of the old content.

    The Apple Lisa Web Page will return someday, I promise...

    --Tom

    --
    MAN SHOOTS ROVER!
  3. It's been done before. by sakusha · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I used to sell Lisas back when they were new. A fair percentage of them went to government research offices. Some of them were wiped of LisaOS and they put SCO Xenix on them, and went straight onto the net. I also used to sell the old original Apple Portable (you know, the huge one with the lead-acid batteries) with AIX and they went on the net too.

    So this bozo is going about it entirely the wrong way. It's not like its the first time anyone used a Lisa on the net. It's just that there was no HTTP back when the Lisa was new. Most people used UUCP and FTP.

  4. It's not running as a Lisa by Animats · · Score: 4, Interesting
    Sadly, it's a Lisa 2 running as a Mac. MacOS System 7, no less.

    The Lisa, unlike Macs until the 68030 machines, had an MMU, and hence could support a protected-mode operating system, which it did. So running a server on an original Lisa with the original software wouldn't be unreasonable. (You'd have to implement a TCP stack, probably in Lisa Pascal, but so be it.)

    Unfortunately, Motorola was years late with MMU support for the 680x0 line, and Apple had to homebrew their own MMU. This didn't work very well due to limitations of the M68000 (fixed in the M68010, years too late), and added considerably to the parts count and cost. It also required that all Lisa programs be compiled without using register incrementation on instructions that accessed memory, because the 68000 couldn't back those out on a page fault.

    Motorola was so close. If only they hadn't been late with the 68K support chips, we might have avoided the whole x86 era.

  5. Commodore 64 web server by adadun · · Score: 5, Interesting

    If you think this is cool, you might want to check out this. It is a Commodore 64 that is running as a web server, and has been up 24/7 since november 2001. It is connected to the Internet via a 38400 bps SLIP link so it is quite slow.

    For those of you who doesn't remember the Commodore 64, it was a very popular home computer in the 80's and early 90's. It has 64k RAM and an 8-bit 1 MHz 6502 CPU.

    The C64 web server is running the small uIP TCP/IP stack that is less than 4k large and uses only a few hundred bytes of dynamic RAM. Since it is written in C, it has been ported to numerous other systems such as the 8-bit Ataris and a number of embedded processors such as the Hitachi H8S.