You can only imagine that when they made Star Trek back in the 1960s, they would have laughed if anyone suggested they’d still be making the show nearly six decades later. If you told [John Kemeny] at Dartmouth back in 1964 that people would be serving websites in Basic in the year 2024, he’d probably be amazed after you explained what a website was. But that’s what [Jamonholmgren] is doing.
[Jamon] wrote his first Basic program when he was 12, which was a common thing to do. Recently, he decided to build and deploy a website using Basic, and so this project, qub (pronounced like cube), was born. The web server is modified from an existing source but adds features and many new features are planned.
The main program essentially creates a starter set of HTML and related files for the server. Honestly, we don’t recommend a server in Basic, but it is fun to see Basic — granted a modern version of QuickBasic — being up to the task.
It would probably be smarter to dedicate an old phone to the task. Or you could stand up an old DOS computer, but that’s probably not any better.
I wonder how much work it would have been to get QB64 working as a CGI interpreter. Not sure why so many reimplementations of a HTTP server are necessary.
Yup, should have used CGI. Oh well it’s not supposed to be practical.
I had a friend on the ancient QBasic forums who did just that as an experiment. It was slow as balls, but it worked.
Use Wordstar for DOS mail merge to generate the HTML.
Hand tuned x86 assembler.
It will scream.
I remember learning how simple HTTP was back when I was into Visual Basic (6). A friend and I were each writing our own web servers, just to do it. His had all sorts of silly features like recognizing friend’s IPs and then displaying custom messages (and I think he had PHP working too). Mine just served up files.
Wow, that was a little while ago…
No worse than python :)
Appreciate everyone that’s been interested in my little fun experiment! If you’re interested in trying it out, I’d love feedback / PRs to improve it.