You Never Forget Your First Web Server: Zawodny gets nostalgic about his first Web server. — a 486DX2 machine. It’s nice piece, full of memories.
That application led to the student government paying me $400 a year or so later to build the first on-line voting system. That’s right, back in 1997 or 1998 we had the option of voting on-line for our student government elections. That involved more Perl code (complete with socket programming) and a little flat-file database system (with locking) to hold the data. No PHP, no MySQL.
I didn’t get my first Web server until I got to the corporate world, but my first computer was a 90Mhz Pentium with 8MB of RAM and a 1GB hard drive. I overclocked it to 100MHz — I was such a rebel.
My first PC was a "Laser" or whatever that brand was, at Sears, 286 with a 40MB hard drive. I don't remember the ram but when my friend witha 386 upgraded to a 4mb expansion card it was like he had a super computer. Before that I had the C64 and Vic20's.
My first server was a Dell cheapo desktop server that we paid about $1700 which included Windows Server OS license. Since then, about 5 years ago, I've found renting a dedicated server a much better and cheaper solution.