Microsoft Personal Web Server

» see microsoft.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Windows 98 shipped with a web server on the disc. It sat in the add-ons folder and installed in about a minute. Once it was running, your desktop answered requests on port 80 like any other machine on the internet. Most people never opened that folder. The ones who did found out that a web server is a program, not a building.

In Turkey in 1999 this was a strange thing to own. Home internet was a modem dialing TTNet and the address changed on every connection, so nothing you served had a stable place to be found. The line also dropped when someone else in the house picked up the phone. The machine could be a server. The line could not.

What Personal Web Server actually gave you was somewhere to test, and that turned out to be the part worth having. You pointed a browser at http://localhost/ and got your own page back, which sounds like nothing and was not. Before that, checking your work meant uploading to a free host over a modem and reloading until it looked right.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ where it came from ~

The code was not Microsoft's to begin with. Vermeer Technologies wrote it as the server half of FrontPage, and Microsoft bought Vermeer in early 1996 because it wanted the editor. The server came along in the deal and got installed by every FrontPage version from 1.1 through FrontPage 98.

On Windows NT Workstation 4.0 the same idea shipped under a different name, Peer Web Services, built on IIS 2.0 and later 3.0. With IIS 4.0 in the NT 4.0 Option Pack the naming was settled and it became Personal Web Server everywhere. There was also a Macintosh version, assembled from code Microsoft picked up when it acquired ResNova Software in November 1996.

~ what it could actually do ~

PWS 4.0 was the last version and it did more than the name suggests. It served HTTP and FTP. It ran basic CGI and a subset of classic ASP, which meant VBScript executing on your own machine against a database sitting right next to it. That is a full development stack on a home computer in 1998.

The limits were built in on purpose. It was made for a handful of connections at a time and Microsoft positioned it that way, as a development and small-workgroup server rather than something to put on the open internet. Plenty of small sites ran on it in production anyway, which Microsoft did not recommend and could not prevent.

~ the long tail ~

Windows 2000 arrived on 17 February 2000 with IIS 5.0 as a standard component, and that ended Personal Web Server as a separate thing you installed. Nothing followed PWS 4. Windows Me and Windows XP Home shipped with no local web server at all, so a home user on the consumer edition of XP in 2001 had less than a home user with a Windows 98 disc in 1998.

The last reason to keep it around went in 2005, when Visual Studio 2005 shipped a lightweight test server inside the editor. Nobody needed to install anything to test a page any more, because the tool that wrote the page was also serving it. Personal Web Server was never announced dead. It just stopped being on the disc.

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