[wang_li]

It is more than a little weird. A pi zero is more than capable of handling HTTP/1.2 and TLS 1.3 for a handful of connections per second. This machine is 10x what we were running web servers on in the '90s.

Also, all web pages are served from RAM. It's automatic that modern OSes will cache this stuff on first access.

[amatecha]

Yeah, I ran a phpbb forum (alongside my normal static site) on a 486 in 2003 or so. It worked. It was slow, but it worked just fine for my friends and I! I remember it took multiple minutes to generate the SSH server key after the initial install lol

[mercutio2]

A 486 in 2003? Pentiums were shipping by the mid-90s, did you just have super old hardware lying around?

I retired my 486 in ‘95 or thereabouts…

[ssl-3]

In the mid-90s, I retired my 486 hardware and brought it over to a local ISP that we were friends with.

It had a second life doing stuff like delivering mail, handling IRC, serving web pages, and whatever else a few of us wanted from it. The performance was fine.

(The Pentium-ish machines stayed on desktop duty where GUIs devoured resources.)

[amatecha]

Yeah, I was actually running it on a 386 at first. In those days I didn't have much money and I just dumpster-dived computer hardware that was thrown out behind computer shops. Back before recycling stuff got regulated, PC repair shops threw out totally-working hardware all the time. Every piece of hardware of the web server was free, including the monochrome CRT monitor I had hooked up to it, and the awesome IBM Model M keyboard. The best dumpster find ever was a working Pentium 4 machine, all they took out of it was the HDD! Good times :)

[Frenchgeek]

In unrelated news: I think the Magic-1 is still online. ( https://www.magic-1.org be gentle with it)

[kristianp]

I was initially thinking does the pi zero even have floating point? But then I remembered that encryption only uses integer operations, not even very large ones.

[joe_mamba]

>This machine is 10x what we were running web servers on in the '90s.

Kind of irrelevant since operating systems and web pages in the 90's were significantly smaller in footprints, as the web was mostly plain text back then. Windows XP with its GUI would run Max Payne on 128MB of RAM. You could do a lot more back then that You can't do modern stuff like that today with 128MB of RAM.

[j45]

The contents of webpages are largely the same.

HTML code, CSS, Javascript, Images.

In this case, they are static elements, which can even be cached locally to share more easily.

If someone wants a massive build system to render a static HTML page, that's on them, and their personal interpretation. Increasingly, and maybe more often than not, there is more than one way to get the same outcome.

The fact that there's hundreds of downloads for a single web page is up to the constructor of that page. Still, these things can be reasonably cached. For example, host it on the Pi, then put a cloudflare in front of it or something.

The Pi Zero might not be for you, or easy to try to undermine. Which criticisms would go away if it was on a regular pi?

[tracker1]

Even then... it's usually built before it's deployed n the server.. the server is still delivering text, css, js, images and images have always been pretty large. So your connection is tied up for a little bit longer... and as content was smaller in the 90's, connections themselves are much faster today... in the 90's you were lucky to be hosting on a T1 or faster and clients on modems. Today, you've likely got between 100mb to 2gb uplink on your home connections, let alone business connections that generally start at 1gb. 600x the bandwidth for the server from a T1

[j45]

It's possible enough to work from the publication point backwards.

A T1 today put behind relevant caching like CloudFlare could still get a lot done.

Today's home internet speeds between 1gig fibre and up can handle a lot too.

Understanding what's needed, how it could be delivered, constraints can all factor into how to approach structuring, developing and publishing any web application.

[joe_mamba]

>Which criticisms would go away if it was on a regular pi?

Maybe you misunderstood. Which criticism did I make of the pi zero? I criticized present day SW.

[huijzer]

You can host such sites perfectly well nowadays. I’ve often served hand-written HTML pages of only few lines

[lq9AJ8yrfs]

LLMs, including open ones, are really good at this it turns out. It stands to reason, there is tons of training material out there no doubt they have consumed and are ready to regurgitate.

Yesterday I one-shotted several interactive pages, that Qwen built out of straight HTML and Javascript. I handed it my API (source code, not even a swagger, via an MCP that Qwen wrote for me), asked for a frontend, and it delivered. One page at a time to keep context down, and mightve gotten lucky on the first draw but after the first one I told it to make the next ones like the first.

Can't say I've had that experience with backend languages & frameworks, incl writing that same API, but perhaps I'm off the beaten path with those, or perhaps there's greater breadth of things to do vs a narrower set of acceptance criteria? IDK.

Here I was sweating that I'd have to research and learn a current-day frontend framework. It felt like a magic wand using consumer-grade AI. HTML and plain old Javascript was plenty.

Tangent but apropos of other contemporary threads on HN, it puts a spin on supply chain threats. There's no NPM or anything, except perhaps whatever mysteries are baked into the model.

[walrus01]

Anyone remember 32 bit/33 MHz PCI slot SSL accelerator cards? As I recall openbsd had kernel driver support for several

[raddan]

Yes. I still have one. I used it in a Soekris 486-class machine running OpenBSD for many, many years. I stopped using the Soekris when they dropped driver support for the accelerator. I think i386 support might be gone now too. Cool little card; I think I might still have it in a drawer somewhere.

[myself248]

I remember the MiniPCI variants, it makes sense that a full-size PCI one would've existed. Post a photo if you find it!