Sure it will work on port 80! Otherwise we wouldn't be able to build
http://www.openacs.org, which runs on port 80! :)
You have to be the superuser under Unix/Linux to bind to port 80. That's why we default to port 8000, we assume that first you develop a site and later make it a production site. When developing ... you don't really want to force the sysadmin to give every developer superuser privileges on the system just so they can start/restart AOLserver.
To run on port 80 you start AOLserver as the superuser. You pass AOLserver a non-superuser user (for instance "aolserver") with the "-u" switch.
AOLserver then starts as root, binds to port 80, and after binding set itself as the non-superuser user you've passed in with "-u". For security reasons, AOLserver won't run as superuser, you must provide a non-superuser user for it to switch to after binding to port 80 running as superuser.
Make sense?
