Gerhard Fiedler writes:

> Peter Johansson wrote:
> 
> > The reason most people don't know of this is that Macs actually worked
> > very well as desktop machines with cooperative multitasking, unlike
> > Windows boxen of the time which BSODed or needed to be rebooted
> > several times each day.
> 
> How come then that some Mac web developer acquaintances of mine never heard
> of having a development web server running on their machines in pre-OS X
> times? Something that was quite common among Windows web developers
> (working on NT type systems). Did they just not know?

The question here is, "what is a development server?"  Are you talking
about a server for static content, or are are you talking about a
server with dynamic capabilities?  For static content, there is no
reason you can't simply use the local filesystem as your "development
server."  The problem really arises from the lack of a server for
dynamic content from pre-OSX Macs.

I ran a small web company back in the mid '90s.  All of our servers
ran Apache on some flavor of Unix.  Just about all of our artists and
designers worked on Macs, and since we didn't care where anyone
worked, most of them worked from home.  Once they had a design they
liked, they'd toss it up on one of our servers for client approval.
Once the customer approved the design, then we'd cut everything up
into templates and let PHP generate the final pages.  Of course, this
is ancient technology now, but back then when everyone else was
cutting and pasting pages all day long, we were *extremely*
profitable.

Since I never did any server work on anything aside from Unix I can't
say for sure, but while it seems correct that full server development
on the desktop did come to Windows prior to MacOS, MacOS wasn't really
all that far behind.

-p.
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