Apple and the Macintosh computers have a loyal following dating back long before the first iPod ever hit the streets. There are millions of old Macs in circulation, and as would be expected in these days of the internet and tinkering enthusiasts, some of them have ended up as web servers. An old Mac obviously never gets useless.

Why do we care? Because we think it is really cool that these old workhorses are still being put to good use in spite of being, at least in “IT time”, antiques. Some of the ones we found acting as web servers are almost 20 years old.

(Credit must go to the excellent resource The Old Apple Web Server Directory where we found the included web servers.)

Old Macs as web servers? How well does that work?

We decided to check how well these old Macs are performing in their new-found role as web servers. You can view the results at a public uptime report page we have created specifically for this purpose. We have added a few already, and plan on adding more over time.

Please note that we have just started, so be sure to come back and check out the statistics over time. We will keep a close eye on the list and blog about the results and if we add more servers.

And yes, we are aware that this can hardly be called a scientific, deeply realistic test, and that there are plenty of other factors involved in regards to the reliability of these web servers, for example what kind of network they are on, what software they are running, and so on. But still, this is nostalgia at its best, meeting the modern web.

Here below is a list of the Mac-hosted websites we have added for uptime monitoring so far. In the spirit of this being mostly about the actual Mac models and not the websites themselves, we have limited it to one website per Mac model in the few cases we found more than one.

Websites hosted on good OLD Macs

Model: Macintosh SE/30

URL: http://se-30.dyndns.org/
Year: 1988
OS: Mac OS 7.5.5
Web server: Mac HTTP 2.6
More info: http://se-30.dyndns.org/info.html
View its uptime report page!

Model: Macintosh IIci

URL: http://littledork.err0neous.org/
Year: 1989
OS: NetBSD
Web server: Apache
More info: http://littledork.err0neous.org/
View its uptime report page!

Model: Macintosh LC

URL: http://quadzilla.servegame.org/
Year: 1991
OS: Mac OS v?
Web server: Mac HTTP 2.6
More info: http://quadzilla.servegame.org/about_this_server.html
View its uptime report page!

Model: Macintosh Color Classic

URL: http://colorclassic.dyndns.org/
Year: 1993
OS: Mac OS 7.6.1
Web server: Mac HTTP 2.6
More info: http://colorclassic.dyndns.org/
View its uptime report page!

Model: Macintosh LC III (Performa 450)

URL: http://450.servehttp.com/
Year: 1993
OS: Mac OS 7.5.5
Web server: Mac HTTP 2.6
More info: http://450.servehttp.com/about/
View its uptime report page!

Model: Macintosh LC III+

URL: http://babylonlc.no-ip.org:8080/english/index.html
Year: 1993
OS: Mac OS 7.5
Web server: Mac HTTP 2.6
More info: http://babylonlc.no-ip.org:8080/english/server.html
View its uptime report page!

Model: Macintosh Quadra 650

URL: http://mirandafam.ath.cx/
Year: 1993
OS: Mac OS 8.1
Web server: Mac HTTP 2.6
More info: http://mirandafam.ath.cx/
View its uptime report page!

Model: PowerBook 540c

URL: http://www.haddockdot.co.uk/
Year: 1994
OS: Mac OS 8.1
Web server: Mac HTTP 2.6
More info: http://www.haddockdot.co.uk/
View its uptime report page!

Send us tips!

This list is just a starting point. If you have, or know of, more websites hosted on old Macs, please email to apple [at] Pingdom.com. Subject should start with “Mac”.

Looking at these old Mac web servers has been a nostalgic trip down memory lane, and we are looking forward to adding more of them based on your feedback.

Note: We are only testing these servers once every five minutes, and only load the HTML, so it is a very light check. Note also that the response time shown in the reports is the load time of the HTML.

Have you ever wondered how much money Google, Microsoft, Apple, IBM, Yahoo, Amazon and other tech giants have in the bank? What kind of assets do they have, how much spending money do they have? The vague answer is, “a lot.” But if you want to find out exactly how much, read on.

Read more

Microsoft and open source, those are two things that traditionally don’t mix. Quite the opposite; the more hardcore members of the open source community tend to view Microsoft as just one step below Satan.

But while much of the open source community has little love for Microsoft, Microsoft is actually trying desperately to send some love back. The Redmond giant may have its own business reasons for doing so, of course, but that doesn’t change the fact that Microsoft is contributing to open source in more ways than most people are aware of.

Read more

What do Android, Visio, Flash, Hotmail, Google Analytics and Powerpoint all have in common? Can you guess?

The answer is: None of them were created by the companies who now own them. They were acquisitions.

These products have continued to develop at their new homes, but the seed of innovation that sparked an actual, new product came from the outside. The key word here is innovation.

Read more

We all know Google is huge and their wide range of services are bound to have a fair share of competitors, but you may be surprised just how wide-ranging Google considers its competition to be.

Here below we have included a quote from Google’s latest SEC filing with some very interesting information about what Google has to say about its competition.

Read more

Big sites and services like Yahoo, Facebook, Twitter and many others rely heavily on open source software to run their operations. Happily, this isn’t a one-way street. They are also giving back to the open source community, not just by contributing to existing projects, but sometimes by open sourcing their own internal projects, giving back something completely new.

And what these popular sites can contribute is often quite valuable. Since they tend to be very large, they run big operations and have been forced to create solutions for scalability and performance problems that most other sites simply don’t have to deal with.

Read more