But how can I run a web server on my computer that is not hooked up to the web?

Well, you "can" run a web server locally, but it will only be useful for testing and development. That is, you will create a network composed of one computer and then use your web browser to access the web server!

You can easily pick up a free web server for any operating system you are using. For UNIX and Windows I recommend Apache. You can also use the Sambar Web Server for Windows. In the case of this tutorial, I downloaded Sambar from www.winfiles.com because it is so incredibly easy to install. However, which Web Server you choose will not make a difference for this tutorial. They will all work like Sambar for our purposes.

Once you download the self-extracting executable file from www.winfiles.com, you run the setup program and the server is installed. There is not much else to it. The server is fairly featureless, but for testing purposes that can be just what the doctor ordered.

Once that is done, try running Sambar! You should see the status window. Once that is done, you can try connecting to your personal web server. Just use your IP address in the location field in Netscape or Internet Explorer or use "localhost". You can see in the following image, that my Netscape document request is being registered and handled by Sambar.