Saturday, February 13th, 2021

(My Little) User-Agent Database
===============================

It started on my Czech blog[1], where I posted about aggregators of
links to small footprint pages[2][3][4]. My statement was, that even
though I deeply agree with the idea of making websites as little as
possible, it is at least weird to create such a small site and then
publish it via HTTPS or even HTTP/2 without the possibility of plain
HTTP access, because that doesn't make the page accessible to more
machines. It really doesn't matter where the page has ten, hundred
or thousand kilobytes or even ten megabytes - for any old computer
the biggest barrier is the protocol itself.

And when talking about old machinery, don't think about some
pre-Core2 class PC. Think about machines way, way older.

You see, when I started my original blog in 2007, there were some of
my readers, that were accessing it from operating systems old even by
standards of that era. I had one visitor, who posted in the comments,
that he has just two machines on his desk: Macintosh Quadra with
System 7 and an i486 box with Linux. He does digital photos on the
first and everything else on the second one. When he needs some raw
processing power, he connects to some remote server with dozen of CPU
and has no need to have any modern or strong machine at home.

Five or six years earlier, there were even more such people. I spent
my evenings and my parents' money (dial-up era, $1 per hour) on IRC.
I was frequently chatting with people who connected online from their
Amiga 1200, Atari Falcon, or some old PC box with FreeBSD. Everything
is relative - these machines were no older than 10 years by then and
yet seemed somehow ancient in the era of Windows XP. A ten-year-old
computer now, that is Intel "Ivy Bridge" microarchitecture CPU[5]
with DDR3 memory and SSD. Nobody considers that ancient, because it
runs current versions of operating systems smoothly and the speed
difference between such a machine and anything you can buy new right
now for a reasonable amount of money is certainly not as huge as
between Pentium 4 and Atari Falcon back in 2002.

World-Wide-Web is pure bloatware these days, but for a ten-year-old
machine is it much easier to handle than it was back in 2002. There
were enormous efforts to bring a WWW browser to them, because it was
perceived as the borderline between useful and useless computer. But
in the long term, they had no chance. Widespread use of ever stronger
and stronger encryption standards, enforcing them by modern browsers,
JavaScript and high-bandwidth multimedia everywhere - no browser
developed as a one-man project could cope with this. So they slowly
disappeared.

I made a little Python script, that processed lighttpd access logs
from the last six days and analyzed user-agent strings. I published
the results for three domains, hosted on my server, on my Czech
blog[6] and there was hardly any surprise - even on websites oriented
on alternative systems or retrocomputing the most frequented systems
are Windows, Android, iOS, macOS (Intel), and Linux.
Usually in this order.

But I am a dreamer. I still think, that not everybody left. I still
imagine that somewhere out there is someone still trying to browse
from his Quadra, Amiga, SGI, Sun, or i486. That's why I created
(My Little) User-Agent Database[7]: a very simple page that does just
one thing - it collects user-agent strings of its visitors and counts
them. It's quickly written in Python during one frosty February
afternoon and as the front-end is a valid HTML 3.2, it should be
displayable on about everything, that ever had a working web browser.

To get relevant data, the URL needs to be spread as much as possible.
I hope that some of "The Ancient and Alternative" will pop out soon.

(Python and HTML code as well as this phlog post and all the other
text were written on a SGI O2 with 200MHz MIPS R5000 CPU, 256 MB of
RAM and display with resolution 1280x1024 in 32bit collors. This
machine was still being sold in 2001, yet it can't open any of [2][3]
[4] sites. I rest my case.)

[1] http://technomorous.eu/post/174712347534
[2] https://1mb.club
[3] https://512kb.club
[4] https://250kb.club
[5] gopher://gopherpedia.com:70/0/Ivy%20Bridge%20(microarchitecture)
[6] http://technomorous.eu/post/174722357635
[7] http://uadb.1-2-8.net