Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

My first company website was served of a 120MHz Pentium that also served as the login server where 5 of us ran our X clients (with the X servers on 486's with 16MB RAM)...

And it wasn't static: We because peoples connections were mostly so slow, we used a CGI that shelled out to ping to estimate connection speed, and return either a static image (if you were on a dialup) or a fancy animated gif if you were on anything faster.

(the ping-test was obviously not reliable - if you were visiting from somewhere with high latency, you'd get the low bandwidth version too, no matter how high your throughput was - but that was rare enough; it worked surprisingly well)




I love that so much. You just don't see wacky solutions like this any more. I guess it's a good thing, but this career has gotten a hell of a lot less fun and interesting.




Consider applying for YC's Fall 2025 batch! Applications are open till Aug 4

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: