Re:Why Ruby on Rails still matters
by vidarh on Friday February 21, 2025 @03:24PM
(#43132510)
My first company website was served of a 120MHz Pentium that also served as the login server where 5 of us ran our X clients (with the X servers on 486's with 16MB RAM)...
And it wasn't static: We because peoples connections were mostly so slow, we used a CGI that shelled out to ping to estimate connection speed, and return either a static image (if you were on a dialup) or a fancy animated gif if you were on anything faster.
(the ping-test was obviously not reliable - if you were visiting from somewhere with high latency, you'd get the low bandwidth version too, no matter how high your throughput was - but that was rare enough; it worked surprisingly well)
Re:Why Ruby on Rails still matters
by JohnBooty on Saturday February 22, 2025 @12:31PM
(#43141057)
I love that so much. You just don't see wacky solutions like this any more. I guess it's a good thing, but this career has gotten a hell of a lot less fun and interesting.
And it wasn't static: We because peoples connections were mostly so slow, we used a CGI that shelled out to ping to estimate connection speed, and return either a static image (if you were on a dialup) or a fancy animated gif if you were on anything faster.
(the ping-test was obviously not reliable - if you were visiting from somewhere with high latency, you'd get the low bandwidth version too, no matter how high your throughput was - but that was rare enough; it worked surprisingly well)