A bit of history

The early years...

This all started back in July '93, when at the suggestion of Justin Mason, James Casey set up the original maths department WWW server. Then we used Plexus, the Perl based server by Tony Sanders of BSDI. Colman quickly started proving information, including his hypertext interface to MOOs. Also Simon and his Powerbook (100, then Duo 230, and finally 520... ) came onto the team, contributing graphics galore...

We even had a token physicist way back then, when Ross, after slowing down our machines doing computations on chaotic pendulums finally produced some pretty pictures for us to look at... Also, Zed put up a hypertext version of the Irish Constitution as well as hyperising the departmental prospectus, though that has since been updated by David Wilkins. Various other people supplied pages, including Andrew, and Matt with the Croquet Club page.

Stage 2

The summer of '94 saw James move to CERN for three months, and also saw a new impetus in developments. We moved to the CERN HTTPD on maths, both as a server, and a caching proxy daemon. We also moved to a bigger partition (440 Mb), which allows much more information to be stored. Simon overhauled the Iona Technologies server, the second one in Ireland.

Also, Dr David Wilkins, started putting official departmental information onto the web. This year also saw the introduction of the web as part of our first year computer course 061, and the growth of user's home pages.

So what next?

Well, James went off to a job hacking for Harlequin when he finished in the summer of '95 and Sharon Murphy took over. We started a number of summer-job-scheme project, including Niall Murphy's work putting Irish lessons on the web.

With the growing popularity of the web some sections of our server were suffering from overpopularity! Our image archive (run by Peter Clifford and Cliodnha McGurk) was closed during office hours and the pages of Steven Jacob, Jamie Ruane and others had to find new homes.

During this time we also started using the Harvest cache, a more complicated beast which can co-operate with other proxies.

And then?

Alan Spencer, Karl Stanley and numerous others involved with our web spent the summer of '96 working as web developers at home and in America.

Meanwhile, at home, Tim Murphy ran a several one day workshop on Java - an up and coming language at the time.

Sharon went to work for Omicron as a technical writer after the summer of '96 and David Malone filled in as web master, until Dermot Frost took over later that year.

On the technical front our server was now a locally hacked version of the CERN server, to fix various little bugs. We actually found a bug in 4.4 BSD NFS with it! For a proxy server we moved to Squid, a derivative of the Harvest cached (proxy servers were growing rapidly in sophistication).

The closing years of the millennium...

Dermot moved us over to Apache, an improved version of the NCSA http daemon at the end of 1997. Apache has been remarkably well behaved, and allowed us to better control what is exported onto the web.

The pattern of use of the web seems to have changed aswell. In the early days people surfed home pages of people, looking for interesting tidbits. Now it seems that people prefer larger coherent sites, such as the David Wilkins' History of Mathematics now hold peoples attention.

On the other hand, users web pages now are receive far more maintenance than our main web pages. We've had some political action on the web during Senate and Student elections (for example Kevin Byrne's Education campaign, produced by Owen O'Byrne).

The Dawn of a New Age?

Ross Wynne was our Webmaster for a bit and set up the ht://Dig search stuff on the site. Lin Ali is currently watching over our web.

The Next Generation?

Maths and CS engaged in some experiment using IPv6 in 1999 and 2000 and we got real IPv6 connectivity and DNS from HEAnet in 2001. In April 2002 we started using Apache 2.0, which means we could finally offer our web pages over IPv6.

Late in 2002 we also found some loonies using our web server as a way to set their clocks! The age of tunnelling everything through HTTP has obviously come to its inevitable end.


David.