[johnnyforeigner]

Half Bakery is some awesome old-skool internet stuff. Back in the late 90s it was one of my favourite haunts. Sadly they lost all their content somehow and didn't have a full backup so, funny though it is now, there was some epic stuff on the old site that is lost forever.

[wpietri]

Very old school indeed! From the about section: "The halfbakery software is implemented as one big C CGI program, edited with vi, compiled with gcc, invoked by an Apache http server."

[yawz]

Wow! A blast from the past. I started my career in the mid-90s writing software with exactly this same stack.

[derefr]

It's funny—you just need a cgi-bin:

1. with 1777 permissions (sticky bit set); and

2. rsynced between a cluster of systems;

and you've got a modern Function-as-a-Service backend.

[sehugg]

And of course you want to use a flat file database on an NFS server, maybe using some cool flock()s to synchronize writes :)

[smueller1234]

Only to then realise that naive flock() won't cut it on your basic NFS setup so you resort to bizarre tricks like using hard links to the lock file to emulate proper locking on NFS because they can tell you which of the racing clients won. Those were good times... right?

[lscotte]

I think you mean setuid bit. The sticky bit (on binaries) went away when we got VMM/swap.

[derefr]

No, I'm talking about the sticky bit for directories: see

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sticky_bit#Usage

and

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Setuid#sticky_bit

[macintux]

cgic was a great library, even if it was still excruciatingly tedious to write. I'm not entirely certain whether I discovered cgic or Perl first, but I know which one I preferred writing.

[Nursie]

You might be surprised (or horrified) how much is still out there...

[yawz]

Now... If this is true, it is scary indeed :).

[stcredzero]

I started with something built on the CGI.pm Perl module.

[Analemma_]

For all the gripes about cloud computing, the fact that amateurs can set up a website but also have one-click backups and redundancy is worth something. There’s a lot of offbeat web history that’s gone forever because someone’s hard drive crashed.

[0xdeadbeefbabe]

You'd think we'd have a shared hard drive today.

[mlkmt]

I remember browsing it in the 90s... remember any epic stuff from back then?

[johnnyforeigner]

Always loved "Film Noir House" where every room was wired such that it narrated whatever you were doing around the house, but in the style of a Film Noir movie... "He walked into the bedroom... switched on the light..."

[yawz]

Accepting the risk of being downvoted heavily...

Young men + new to browsing + some imagination = Pamela Anderson was epic by then.

[0xdeadbeefbabe]

hamster dance