The Web Project, part I

Inspired by TBL’s recent lecture at the Royal Society, a recent internal Red Hat mailing list thread which got onto the subject of historical web software versions and a renewed interest in CSS, I decided it was time to start a new project….
In a nutshell, the plan is to completely rewrite the HTML for this website, making full use of CSS, with the goal that it be accessible to all browsers, right back to the very first – WorldWideWeb.

You might ask how I intend to verify presentation of the resulting HTML against TBL’s browser. Well, first of all, I happen to be curating Lucy‘s NeXT Cube (called Rubik of course). A little while back I was visiting evolt.org‘s browser archive, and discovered to my amazement a copy of WorldWideWeb version 0.16! So of course I downloaded it my the NeXT, fired it up & went to the Web’s 1992 Front Door.

Hacking Root on a NeXT

First off, I had to make sure that the NeXT was still physically working & able to connect to the Internet. Doh, I’d changed my LAN IP range since the last time I booted Rubik & what’s more I couldn’t remember the root password. Doh. Doh. Doh. No worries, I just boot into single user mode and reset it. I remembered from the last time I had to do this, that just running ‘passwd’ wouldn’t do the trick. NeXTStep uses NetInfo (now updated & present in Mac OS-X) for managing this kind of stuff. Consulting my second brain, Google, I dug out the following instructions for reseting the root password on a NeXT.

1. Power on the machine
2. After the system diagnostics test (ie, when the ‘Testing System’ message is replaced by ‘Loading from Disk’), hold down the Command key and press ~ (tilde).
3. This gets you to the ROM boot prompt, where you enter bsd -s (ie boot the default scsi disk in single user mode).
4. A short while later the system drops you into a shell prompt. As I mentioned earlier, just running ‘password root’ won’t do much good, since the primary password source is in the NetInfo database. To access & change this we need to startup core system services. So run sh /etc/rc &
5. Once the messag “Entering Multi-User Mode” is displayed, you can run nu -m to change the password for root
6. Finally, we reboot into graphical multi-user mode by running shutdown -r now

Now I was able to login as root, update the network settings, reboot once again & then test that WorldWideWeb was still operational. As you can see from this screenshot, it was working fine (well, within acceptable limits for something that was written before HTTP & HTML even reached versions 1.0). Enough for one day. Next time around, its time to plan the new site design.