What platforms were used in the 80s up to about 1993 or 1994 for Internet servers? It can be #FTP, #Gopher, #telnet, #USENET, the #OldWeb, or anything else that was on the Internet in that era.
My research indicates Solaris was very popular for web servers until Linux took over, and so I suspect it (and SunOS before it) was very popular for the Internet in general, but I'd like to hear from anyone with this sort of experience.
@sinza During the 80s, likely VAXes running some BSD variety, also some Sun kit. Moving into the 90s, some sort of TCP/IP was available for more systems, but still BSDs or derivatives mostly. Linux only really started catching on later. And notably ft.cdrom.com, the download site back then, was one (rather beefy for its time) FreeBSD box.
@sinza I was sysadmin in a UK university CS dept back then. We didn't get any kind of internet connection until about 1992-3. The first generally-available web browser, NCSA Mosaic, was only launched in 1993 and took a few more years to become widespread - https://home.cern/science/computing/birth-web/short-history-web . So I would say that period was not so much "oldweb" as pre-web. Even usenet, which existed before the internet, was still very slow and limited. #retrocomputing
@CGM@sinza I date the origin of the web by Marathon, the Mac FPS game. It was released in December 1994, and I know in 1995 I was browsing rudimentary web pages to download Marathon maps, texture packs, etc.
@CodingItWrong haha i have a similar world wide web dating system - for me, it was Ultima VIII: Pagan in 1994. the first thing i did was use lynx to find a text walkthrough for the game, which progressed to searching for Ultima IX screenshots in Mosaic and Netscape a few months later.
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