“Those who can imagine anything, can create the impossible.”
— Alan Turing (.... movie Character, so in reality the Screenwriter Graham Moore)
If you're reading this post, you're already on the internet. But which internet are we on, exactly?
The modern web is largely defined by platform monopolies, walled gardens, algorithmic feeds, and massive cloud backends that need and consume large number of products to integrate, large number of teams to develop, support, operate, etc. you get the gist.
But the original idea was something very different. Something simple. Something personal.
In the 90s and early 2000s, personal homepages were everywhere. Services like Geocities (restoration project), Angelfire, Tripod, and entire Webrings allowed anyone to create a site, link to others, and express themselves — all without a centralized platform or central authority. These weren’t just nostalgic artifacts — they were the entry point for millions of people into publishing, coding, and internet communities. The web grew because people built it by hand, one HTML page at a time.
A few weeks ago, I deployed a small static HTML page at https://thepirate.one. It's hosted on a Raspberry Pi 1 Model B, connected to my Home LAN, Following a variation of the VPS Proxy method published on Post #007, it is accessible through the Internet. It serves one thing: HTML file. No Frameworks. No JavaScript. No Overhead. Just Hand Crafted HTML.
It’s not there to impress anyone.
It’s there to exist — as a quiet protest and a practical homage.
Back to the Beginning
In 1989, Sir Tim Berners-Lee proposed a system to allow researchers at CERN to access and share documents over the internet using a simple hyperlink model. This was the birth of the World Wide Web. HTTP. HTML. A browser and a server. That's all.
In 1992, the first photo was posted online — a low-resolution image of CERN's all-female parody band Les Horribles Cernettes.
Around the same time, the Trojan Room Coffee Pot became the first webcam stream — a live video feed of a coffee machine in a Cambridge lab. Why? Just so researchers could check if coffee was available before walking across the building.
☕️ The web wasn’t born out of profit — it was born out of curiosity, utility and caffeine.
This is the spirit the web was born in: fun, function, and freedom.
My Raspberry Pi as a 90s Web Server
The Raspberry Pi 1 Model B I’m using has:
- 1x ARMv6 core @ 700 MHz
- 512 MB SDRAM
- SD card storage (~32 GB)
- 10/100 Mbps Ethernet
- Running Debian with Apache 2
By today’s standards, this is outdated, underpowered hardware — barely fit for modern web apps.
But let’s compare it to what powered much of the commercial web in the mid-to-late 90s.
Enterprise Hardware Circa 1996–2002
Many production web servers at the time ran on machines like:
- Pentium Pro / Pentium II Xeon / AMD K6 @ ~200–733 MHz
- 128–512 MB ECC RAM
- UltraWide SCSI or IDE drives, often <20 GB
- 100 Mbps Ethernet (if lucky)
Iconic examples:
- Sun Ultra 1 - 143 MHz UltraSPARC, 256 MB RAM
- SGI Indy - MIPS R5000 @ 180 MHz, 64–256 MB RAM
- Compaq ProLiant 1600 - Dual PIII Xeon, 512 MB ECC
- NeXTcube / NeXTstation - 25–33 MHz Motorola 68040, 16–64 MB RAM
NeXT machines are particularly significant — the first web browser and server (info.cern.ch) were built and hosted on a NeXT computer at CERN by Sir Tim Berners-Lee.
Compared to these, my Pi — tiny, silent, and low-power — is not a step backward. It’s a callback to an era where simplicity ruled and one core was all you needed to serve the world.
Bandwidth Then vs. Now
In the 90s:
- T1 = 1.544 Mbps (up/down) — ~$1,000/month
- T3 = 45 Mbps — used by ISPs or universities
- Pages were under 100 KB, images were tiny, and every byte was optimized
Now:
- Home FTTH regularly offers 500 Mbps to 1 Gbps down
- 100+ Mbps up from a basic residential plan
- A Raspberry Pi on your LAN can outperform an entire rack of hardware from 1999
The bottleneck is no longer bandwidth — it's imagination.
Typical 90s Web Server Stack
The web stack in the late 90s was GENERALLY built on open, accessible tools:
- Linux 2.2 or 2.4 kernels
- Apache 1.3.x
- CGI scripts, Perl, PHP 3/4
- MySQL 3.23, PostgreSQL
- Certificates and HTTPS were rare — and expensive
Yes, there also were Proprietary Solutions like: Windows NT, Novell, etc.
My Pi today runs:
- Debian (modern, free software)
- Apache 2.4
- Static HTML
- HTTPS termination at a Webproxy via Caddy
- Private routing with ACLs
- No exposed ports on my LAN to the Internet
The result: a leaner, safer, modern-day relic of the early web.
Architecture Overview
Here’s how the whole system works, end to end:
┌──────────────┐
│ Browser │
└──────┬───────┘
│ https://thepirate.one
▼
┌──────────────────┐
│ Proxy+Caddy │ ← Public HTTPS endpoint
└────────┬─────────┘
│ (Encrypted Tunnel)
▼
┌──────────────────┐
│ Raspberry Pi 1 B │ ← Apache 2, Static HTML
└──────────────────┘
Nothing is exposed to the open internet at home.
No firewall rules to maintain.
No DNS tricks.
Just one path in — tightly controlled.
Why I'm Doing This
Because I can.
Because you can.
Because we should.
I run https://thepirate.one not because it's groundbreaking — but because it's grounding. It's a reminder of what the web was meant to be: human-scale, individually-owned, and creatively free.
No CDN. No minification. No frameworks. Just Apache 2 serving a file from a local machine in my home.
🔊 Every personal website is a signal that says:
I exist outside the algorithm.
Conclusion
The modern web isn’t evil — but it’s easy to forget that it doesn’t have to be so heavy nor centralized. There’s room for personal servers, plain HTML, and decentralized ownership enabling spaces for real thinking, sharing ideas, etc.
That’s why I serve a page from a decade-old Raspberry Pi.
That’s why I explain you how you can do it.
That’s why I believe self-hosting matters — not just as a technical act, but as a statement of intent.
You don’t need a cloud empire to take part in the web.
You just need a wire, a CPU, and the will to serve.
Big Disclaimer: Don't use an original Raspberry Pi as your main lighthouse in the internet, this is a pet project, use something that can't break that easily :D
