A Stanford professor has built a web server from off-the-shelf parts that is small enough to fit in his shirt pocket. Vaughan Pratt, who teaches computer science at the university, put the device together from a 66MHz AMD 486-SX microprocessor and 16MB of RAM. The machine is a tenth of the size of a PalmPilot, runs Linux and connects to the internet through a parallel port. It’s basically a powerful lithe computer, Pratt says, we could have set it up for a number of different uses. But because most people think of servers as mysterious boxes located in dark basements and cranking out stuff for everyone to see, I thought making it into a web server was particularly dramatic. Pratt claims his box is the smallest web server in the world, beating Phar Lap Software’s previous record by an order of magnitude or more. The experiment is part of Pratt’s new Wearables Lab, modeled on the one at MIT.
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