Modder is hosting his personal website on a 40-year-old IBM PCjr

[Shawn Knight]

In brief: In the world of web hosting, uptime is everything. Although this example won't set any records for how long it has been running since its last reboot, it is impressive nevertheless given its age and upgrades.

Software engineer Michael Brutman's personal website is hosted on an IBM PCjr (pronounced PC junior), a machine that launched way back in March of 1984. Brutman's 39-year-old home computer is powered by a NEC V20 CPU clocked at 4.77 MHz and has been modified to accommodate 736 KB of memory (IBM only designed the system with 128 KB in mind).

Other noteworthy mods include a sidecar board that allows the PCjr to boot from an IDE drive and a SATA/IDE bridge, allowing him to run a 240 GB SATA SSD on the ancient computer. The modded box also runs a Xircom PE3-10BT parallel-port Ethernet adapter.

According to the server status page, it went online on March 31 and has been running non-stop ever since. That works out to around 2,590 hours as of this writing, or about 108 days. Again, that's far from groundbreaking but is still pretty neat for a system that is almost four decades old.

According to Guinness World Records, the record for the longest period of continual operation for a computer belongs to the Computer Command System (CCS) onboard NASA's Voyager 2 spacecraft. Voyager 2 left Earth on August 20, 1977, just 16 days before its twin, Voyager 1. That predates the existence of the PCjr by several years.

BrutmanLabs.org is a hobby site that, until now, likely hasn't seen a whole lot of traffic. On the site, you will find details about Brutman's various tech interests including the extensive mods to his PCjr. The site is loading pretty slow right now, no doubt due to the current influx of traffic from stories like this.

What's the longest you've had a computer up and running continuously without rebooting? I shut down my system daily so perhaps a full weekend is my record.

Image credit: IBM by FireMyster470, Internals via The Register

Permalink to story.

https://www.techspot.com/news/99426-modder-hosts-personal-website-40-year-old-ibm.html

 

[sorten]

According to his resume, Brutman has been a Site Reliability Engineer for Google for the past decade. Hosting static content (html, JavaScript, images, etc.) isn't much of a challenge. These days I just throw stuff like that up in AWS S3 or CloudFront (if it's commercial). I wouldn't expect something like that to ever fail.

 

[bviktor]

TechSpot, with this article now you've just DDoS'd the poor thing.

Although this means they don't have Cloudflare or anything in front of it, which they most certainly should.

 

[TheBigT42]

I learned Turbo Pascal on one of these in High School.

 

[TheBigT42]

OH nooo!!!

I had repressed all memories of trying to get laptops to boot and load the Xircom parallel-port Ethernet adapter drivers with enough base memory to load Windows 3.11

How will a sleep tonight!?!?!

 

[Gezzer]

After looking at his site which pretty much mirrors every mid 90's site I've ever seen, I'm not overwhelmingly impressed. While it's not impressive hardware, running a site like that shouldn't stress it that much. In fact I'd be surprised if the SATA SSD was needed. A reasonably fast IDE HDD should work. Not as responsive, but still work.