THE MACHINETHE MACHINETHE MACHINE

No cloud platform, no container orchestrator, no content management system. A single rented virtual server running Debian, an nginx and a handful of small programs written for this site. The whole thing fits in less memory than a browser tab.

THE HARDWARE, SUCH AS IT IS

WHAT RUNS ON IT

An nginx serves every page you can reach. Behind it sit two very small services written for this site: the visitor counter and the shared high score table for the arcade. Nothing else answers from the outside.

Everything else is static. The BASIC interpreter, the games, the puzzle and the courses run entirely in your browser — the server only hands over the files.

WHAT IT DELIBERATELY DOES NOT RUN

• No database. The counter keeps a number. The high score table keeps a short list. Both fit in a file.
• No analytics and no third-party scripts. Nothing here is fetched from anyone else, so nobody else learns that you were here.
• No framework. Every page is hand-written HTML, CSS and JavaScript. The front page, animations and all, is about 29 kB.

KEPT ALIVE

The disk is encrypted end to end, so the machine is unreadable to anyone holding the storage rather than the running system. Backups are pulled off the server every night to hardware at home, which means the copies do not share a power cable, a provider or a fire brigade with the original.

Availability is measured from inside the machine every couple of minutes and published on the status page, and from the outside once a minute by a monitor at home that raises an alarm on a phone when something stops answering.

WHY SO SMALL

Because the constraint is the interesting part. A gigabyte and one core is roughly a hundred thousand times what a Commodore 64 had, and the site it serves is a tribute to that machine. Anything that does not fit in this box probably did not need to exist.