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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

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.

paulgb 4y ago
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 https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc2068#section-14.23
justinlloyd 4y ago
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.