Building pieter.com, my retro PC in the browser
This blog is a rough collection of tweets describing how I built my retro computer project pieter.com. It started with buying pieter.com and thinking what I should do with it. I wanted to make a classic 1990s web homepage. I quickly started adding more stuff and then someone asked me "does it play DOOM?", at which I added DOOM. That meant I also had DOS running in the browser and tried to install Windows. That worked, and slowly the project moved in that direction. It took a lot more time for me to get dial-up internet working, setting up a dial-up ISP at pieter.net and a HTTP proxy at pieter.org.
Added a 0️⃣0️⃣1️⃣4️⃣ visit counter and 🐹 hamster dance to http://pieter.com
Added a live group chat to http://pieter.com
http://Pieter.com also has an embedded AltaVista search now
AltaVista is dead though so it searches Perplexity instead @AravSrinivas
http://pieter.com now has an official @perplexity_ai search embed
Inspired by the original AltaVista™ search embed box from 20 years ago!
Added 🐍 Snake to http://pieter.com because much requested
Put your high scores in the chat!
Moved http://pieter.com to its own Hetzner box
So now we can really start hacking on some random shit
💾 Added an actual working FTP server at http://ftp.pieter.com:
ftp://[email protected]
See what you can find in there :D
Would be fun to add telnet or IRC later
Added a fully functional Winamp to http://pieter.com now
It streams MP3s from http://ftp.pieter.com/MP3
Added an IRC server now so you can chat:
I'm in channel #pieter
I'll try find a mIRC like web client to put it on http://pieter.com and connect to it later!
✨ Set up my own IMAP and SMTP mail sever today at
So I can now receive email @pieter.com and also send email from it
So now I have my own:
🌎 WWW server @ http://www.pieter.com
💾 FTP server @ http://ftp.pieter.com
💬 IRC server @ http://irc.pieter.com
📭 Mail server @ http://mail.pieter.com
✨ I spent 6 days trying to connect Windows 3.11 on DOSBox (an emulator) to the modern 2024 internet and was pulling my hair out, asking ChatGPT and Claude for help to fix it and nothing they said worked, but...
NOW IT WORKS!!!
I'm now able to open Netscape (a browser from 1995) and visit Google (although with a lot of errors cause JavaScript changed in 20 years)
Even my own site at pieter(dot)com works now, I just 1) had to enable HTTP again, and 2) disable Cloudflare's WAF because it blocks old browsers with error code 1010 because a 1995 browser visiting your site looks a bit suspicious to them 🤪
It does show a giant blob of CSS at the top, cause