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Comment by mr_sturd | Hacker News Reader

Port explicitly specified in at least one URL. Was HTTP without a standard port back in '94?

> On March 1990 they published the document RFC1060 (https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc1060) where they listed the well-known ports at that time. In that list there wasn't a protocol assigned to port 80. It went from 79 to 81:

    79       FINGER     Finger                                
    81       HOSTS2-NS  HOSTS2 Name Server

> So, at that time port 80 was officially free.

> In 1991 Tim Berners-Lee issued the first version of HTTP in a document about HTTP 0.9 (http://www.w3.org/Protocols/HTTP/AsImplemented.html) where he stated:

>> If the port number is not specified, 80 is always assumed for HTTP.

> Then in July 1992 was published RFC 1340 that obsoletes RFC 1060 (https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc1340) where appears:

    finger           79/tcp    Finger                            
    finger           79/udp    Finger                            
    www              80/tcp    World Wide Web HTTP               
    www              80/udp    World Wide Web HTTP

> That document makes official the port 80 as www or http. [...]

From https://superuser.com/a/996843

So at 1994, 80 is pretty much the default, but sometimes it was specified anyways, just like some addresses you see around still prints/shows http:// / https://. Not everyone know what part of the URI is important or not.

I figured that it was someone's idea to get above the 1024 mark when all they had was a shell account and people weren't using :8080 yet. It could also be that "virtual hosting by name" wasn't a thing yet so a single computer hosting multiple sites had to break it out by port.

I think you’re right that it’s about virtual hosts. AFAICT the Host header first appeared in this 1997 RFC: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc2068#section-14.23

That is correct, there was no way to have multiple hosts on the same machine. One of the start-ups I helped build (engineer #2) in early 1997 (which still exists today in some form that many young, single men have spent quality time alone with) had a landing page, so that if your browser did not provide the host header, it would give you an index page of all the salacious sub websites/sub-domains available that you could then click on - it was an image map, naturally. We were very careful to keep the heterosexual and the homosexual offerings on physically separated servers so that customers did not complain about "accidentally" clicking on content that they didn't want to see. Latest versions of Netscape at the time supported the host header, but Internet Explorer very explicitly did not. And IE was the default for many people just getting online for the first time outside of AOL/Compuserve.

She mentions that this was all downloaded previously. They prob have a local server/DNS.

I don’t remember why, but many engineering schools, including the one I was attending, used 8080 for department websites. I feel like that was the second most common that I saw.

Yes and it was 80.

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