Socket.computer

This article/section contains info about defunct content.

socket.computer is a website which would become the inspiration for CollabVM. It was relatively similar to it, but with the following differences:

• socket.computer did not have a userlist, only a user count, which made collaboration relatively hard.
• socket.computer did not have a chat room. CollabVM added a Xat chatroom at first, but was replaced with a custom one when CollabVM 1.1 released.
• socket.computer had a laptop image which had the VM screen inside it, which was filled to fit the laptop frame.
• socket.computer periodically reset the VM every 15 minutes. Older versions of CollabVM had this behavior as a setting you could enable if you wanted to.
• socket.computer was incredibly vulnerable to exploits, including turnbombing, and server side QEMU monitor console execution. There was even a hack client which was on Computernewb which let you exploit socket.computer. There existed a patch to fix these vulnerabilities, but it is still not recommended to use today.

The site, in its original run, was formerly part of the many demos available on socket.io's demos.

CollabVM v1.0 used the socket.io-computer codebase, but with some notable changes:

• CollabVM's design differed from socket.computer's. CollabVM had a Bootstrap UI, while socket.computer used some basic CSS.
• socket.computer only ran Windows XP while CollabVM ran many different operating systems, which ranged from Windows 95 OSR2 to Windows 7 Ultimate.
• CollabVM did not have the laptop image present, and was scaled fully.
• CollabVM had a chatroom added.
• The component which made the VM reset every 15 minutes was not enabled.
• Several vulnerabilities were fixed. The C++ engine that was introduced by CollabVM 1.1 made it a lot more secure and capable than socket.computer.

CollabVM has several virtual machines, including VM2 that runs Windows XP SP3. It has basically the same specifications as the socket.computer VM (barring more RAM and a far better CPU), but it is much faster and has many more programs preinstalled. If you are looking for a socket.computer alternative, you will want to check it out.

Original timeline

The original socket.computer ran from approximately April 2014 to October 2016.

During and after the month of October 2016, socket.computer began to fall apart.

• October 9, 2016: socket.computer freezes, and the server stops responding. This outage also affected socket.io's chat, as well as weplay.io. This makes October 9, 2016 at 11:25 PM (EST) the last known time socket.computer and weplay.io were online.
• February 19, 2017: socket.io goes offline for unknown reasons.
• March 5, 2017: After socket.io was offline for several weeks, the site came back online, with the demos page missing from socket.io entirely. socket.computer and weplay.io remain in a frozen state.
• March 18, 2017: The demos page finally returns to socket.io. The socket.io chat makes a return, along with a brand new demo, a collaborative whiteboard. weplay.io and socket.computer are removed, so this can be declared the "official" shut down date for both projects.
• Sometime in August 2017: socket.computer and weplay.io's web server stops responding. Pings also fail.
• Sometime in early January 2018: weplay.io no longer belongs to an IP address, indicating the project has been permanently closed. socket.computer still belongs to an IP address at this point, although the site's IP had not responded to any pings since August 2017.
• Sometime in July 2018: socket.computer no longer belongs to any IP address.
• August 25, 2018: socket.computer's domain expires and is now up for sale, confirming the project is permanently closed.
• February 2019: socket.computer now redirects to a parked domain.

The return of socket.computer?

• February 2020: Parked domain is not renewed, and socket.computer is now for sale.
• 11:11:16 AM EST February 6th, 2020: Dartz purchases the socket.computer domain, to use it as a redirect to CollabVM.

While socket.computer had effectively been relegated to a domain sitting in limbo for about 4 years, on April Fools Day (April 1st) 2024, this all changed.

As an April Fools Day joke, the CollabVM site was redirected to socket.computer under the guise that CollabVM had shut down, and the socket.computer domain was then running the original socket.io-computer, running in a VM running Ubuntu 16.04 (even then, the socket.computer code didn't like that very much and had many bugs that didn't even happen on the original site).

On April 3rd, 2024 (fairly close to the 10th anniversary of socket.computer's existence), a custom from-scratch recreation of socket.computer written in TypeScript, no longer using socket.io, was put onto the site and open sourced, and the site is now perpetually running, mostly for historical sake. The new incarnation now has a Xat chatroom included.

A story about socket.computer

Long ago, there was a website simply known as socket.computer, which used to be a demo for socket.io. It hosted a singular virtual machine running the Operating System Windows XP.

The site was never known for being very functional. Very frequently, it would break, the resets would stop working and months would go by before Kevin Roark fixed it.

However, on one fateful dry and cool October evening, the site came to a full stop.

It still has not been explained to this day why socket.computer was permanently shut down.

Perhaps it was the owner getting tired, or maybe, it was the endless amount of exploits.

As some people may know, the site may have been... lacking in security, severely lacking in security.

An endless amount of time they know as "Turns"?

Perhaps a direct access to the main heart and core they also call "QEMU"?

The rumor has it that the old socket.computer stopped working after one of its so called "resets" was the last thing the site had ever seen.

These resets were known to happen just only 15 minutes after one had already occurred.

And after that unknowingly last reset happened, it was the end.

The end of socket.computer.

- Calub Veim