About altocumulus.org
About the computer
This web site is hosted on my home computer, which I named Skalman (after a clever cartoon character). Skalman used to be an Amiga 3000, but with just a 25MHz 68030 and 6MB RAM is was too slow for my needs. (I wanted to write Haskell programs and compile them with HBC.) Buying more memory or a faster CPU for it didn't seem like a cost effective solution, so in April(?) 1996 I replaced the entire box... The new box had a CPU that was about 20 times faster, 64MB RAM, better graphics and better sound. After running FreeBSD for a few years, I switched to Linux, simply because there was no support in FreeBSD for the ISDN box that was included for free in an ISDN/Internet package deal from Telia I got in December 1999.
In August 2000, it was time for another upgrade, this time to a computer that was 8 times faster than the previous one, and with 128MB RAM. Unfortunately, that computer was stolen by burglars in February 2001 and was replaced by a slightly faster computer with 256MB RAM. (The RAM was later extended to 512MB.) That computer had a very long life, but it was finally retired in 2015. The web site is now hosted on a computer that is smaller and faster but still uses less power than the old one.
About the internet connection and the domain name
After having an ISDN-based internet connection for a bit more that a year, skalman finally got, at 11:58 on the 24th April 2001, a working broadband connection with a fixed IP adress. This meant that these web pages became visible to people other than myself!
In the beginning, I used a free domain name serivce (dnsq.org) and gave my computer the name skalman.dnsq.org. When that service stopped working in the end of October 2003 I tought it was about time I registered my own domain name. In the beginning of November, after pondering for a few days, I registered the name altocumulus.org.
In January 2004, I got curious about IPv6, and learnt that it is surprisingly easy to enable IPv6 networking in Linux, even if your ISP doesn't support IPv6 directly, so this web site has since then been available via IPv6 as (and of course also via IPv4).