Hardware One: How I Learned Linux – Part 3.5

[ Thanks to skaven for this link.
]

“In January 1996, I did not yet know that Unix had grown up with
the Internet, nor did I understand the standards that made the
Internet possible. I routinely used telnet, ftp, and netscape, and
I knew that web servers were available on Unix machines as on
Windows, but I did not know how they worked. In short, I was a dumb
user.”

“Just so I could peek under the hood and perhaps even mess
with the engine a little, I desired to set up my own web server, on
my own machine, up close and personal where I could mess with its
config file and “master the damn Internet”, whatever species of
elephant it was.”

“…I had been using the Internet long enough to know that
localhost meant the local machine, and should have reasoned that
you didn’t need a real network to connect from your own machine to
itself. …I instead discovered it by accident.”

Complete
Story