Serweb 0.3

So a while back when I installed a copy of Windows NT 3.1, and put it on the internet, I looked high and low for a web server. Somehow I found this small web server, Serweb by Gus Estrella, which seemed to fit the bill. However one thing that I did notice after a while is that it had a tendency to crash, and it’d require manual intervention to hit an ‘ok’ dialog box. The other stumbling block, was that it was a Win16 application, and Windows NT 3.1 only supports a single WOW instance…. So running Serweb and Netscape always led to issues…

Then the other day, I actually found the source code to serweb! So the first thing I did was to remove the message box function that was preventing me from letting this thing ‘just run’. Well that was cool, but I wondered if this thing was from 1993, meaning it’s MFC dependencies shouldn’t be that involved it may even port to a Win32 application.

So with a few tweaks, mostly in the resource scripts, I was able to rebuild serweb as a win32 application! For the 2-3 people who care about this kind of thing, you can download it here.

I would suspect it’d run on the Dec Alpha or the MIPS, but I haven’t even tried to build it there, as I run NT 4.0 on both of those platforms, and I end up using the IIS that is available.

Serweb 0.3 on WindowsNT 3.1

Serweb 0.3 on WindowsNT 3.1

I do have to admit, I’m kinda surprised that Visual C++ 1.0 for Win32 could handle this… I’ve had pretty mixed results with it, but oddly enough converting a MFC Win16 to a Win32 MFC app seemed somewhat straight forward. It’s probably more so to Gus Estrella’s work then anything I did…!

3 thoughts on “Serweb 0.3

  1. Man, I found this somehow today. i wrote the program to learn C++ and also on HTTP as at that time all servers were for unix and none existed for windows. Was surprised how simple it was. The interesting thing was how many folks reached my way on using the server for production / testing. I recall i think was the University of Georgia someone emailed me to thank for the program and was what they used for their first production www server !!!

    So glad you could use and adapt for your needs.

    Boy do I feel old seeing this in 2013.

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