Just 50 years ago, computers no more advanced than modern calculators filled entire rooms. Today, sleek, powerful laptops are ubiquitous. Now Vaughan Pratt, a professor of computer science, has created the world's smallest web server, a device that can fit into a shirt pocket.
The tiny computer -- assembled from off-the-shelf components -- is less than 1 3/4 inches high and 2 3/4 inches wide but performs all the basic functions of a typical desktop computer.
"We could have set it up for a number of different uses," Pratt says, "but, because most people think of servers as mysterious boxes located in dark basements, I thought making it into a web server was particularly dramatic."
Since going online in January, the tiny server's website has received nearly 190,000 visitors. There people can read about the machine's impressive technical specs: it consists of an AMD 486-SX computer with a 66 megahertz central processing unit, 16 megabytes of random access memory, and 16 megabytes of flash read-only memory. It connects to the Internet through a parallel port and runs a slimmed-down version of Linux, a popular version of the unix operating system.
Pratt created the server in Stanford's Wearables Lab, which is developing computer technology so portable it can be sewn into a piece of clothing. A person "wearing" a computer will be able to see what the device is doing through special eyeglasses that double as a computer display. If you hooked the wearable device into a wireless modem, you could e-mail or check stock prices from anywhere.
Next for Pratt? He's designing a more powerful server using an Intel Pentium chip.
