CommonCrawl Foundation
A web server for very old browsers
Created and Maintained by The Dust Council
Last Update (UTC): 2020-Jan-11
Current Date (UTC): 2020-Jul-05
This server is configured to work with old or obscure web browsers.
To that end, the HTML may be a bit spotty when it comes to standards.
Gopher was a menu-driven, mostly text-based protocol designed to serve documents and other resources in the early 1990s, before the World Wide Web became dominant.
Initially, gopher clients were designed for text-based terminals, but early graphical web browsers supported the protocol as well, however this functionality was later removed.
Use a gopher client or plugin to explore gopherspace at: gopher://blizzardofzeros.com
For more information on how to do this, try apt-get gopher or similar on your Linux system, or download the Overbite browser plugin at Floodgap.
There are several Winsock clients available for Windows 3.1x, and early browswers may support gopher links natively.
The Wikipedia page on gopher may also be helpful.
Finger allowed local or remote users to look up various information on users with accounts on the same or remote Unix systems. In a sense, it was a version of an online profile.
Unexpectedly, Windows 10 (as of this writing) provides a finger client at the command line natively.
You can use a finger client to finger dustcouncil@blizzardofzeros.com to see the protocol in action.
On Linux or xBSD systems, try apt-get finger or similar to install a client. There are a variety of Winsock finger clients for Windows 3.1x as well.
See the Wikipedia article on the Finger protocol for more information.
FTP is a protocol dating back to ARPANET (1971), and one of the oldest protocols still in use on the Internet. It is used to serve and retrieve files from remote systems.
Stubborn in its persistence, FTP is still in wide use on the modern Internet. Nearly all operating systems provide native support from the command line, as do browsers.
Explore our FTP server at: blizzardofzeros.com
See the Wikipedia article on FTP for more information.
Explore our image gallery consisting of very old GIF87a graphics, which should work in even in the oldest browsers.
Check out a list of emulation recipes, mainly focused on putting old 8 bit systems on the Internet via emulators running on modern machines.
A list of old browsers tested with this website along with screenshots.
See more information about this server's configuration.
See your information. (User agent, IP address, etc.)
Contact information if you need it.
See also: frostwarning.com
