Reviving an old computer is like restoring a classic car: There’s a thrill from bringing the ancient into the modern world. So it was with my first “real” computer, my Mac Plus, when I decided to bring it forward three decades and introduce it to the modern Web.
It’s amazing what’s possible on these old machines.
When I surfed on the linked website my AntiVir tool informed me about “HTML/Infected.WebPage.Gen2”!
Avast doesn’t say anything – and it is crazy over-sensitive.
Then again, I use a locked-down Firefox…
In his case I would have stuck to Lynx rather than MacWeb. It should be the first port of call for anyone wanting to get ancient beast like the Mac Plus onto the Web. Not sure how easy it would be to compile the latest versions for Mac, mind…
Almost impossible. System 7 used MPW and Lightspeed compilers (later owned by THINK and then Symantec) mainly. MPW is probably still available, but good luck finding a legal copy of Lightspeed C. I think Metrowerks Codewarrior is too new to compile on another machine then port across – it certainly won’t run on that vintage of Mac.
Your next issue is that the Mac had no command line, so you’d need to find some way round that. I’d assume that something like Metrowerks’ SIOUX existed for the older compilers, but I really don’t know.
Then the vintage of the C in question (30 years out of date.)
It would not be trivial and way more effort than using a pre compiled option.
There’s MacLynx
Yeah, might be an option – but it’s probably not a recent version of Lynx, right? Also, looks like it requires a 68020, so might be out of luck. I think the SE was the first compact Mac with a 68020.
It’s definitely a better browsing experience than this MacPlus, but it’d still be nice to have a Proxy that removes a lot of cruft that is ‘modern’ web sites.
IBrowse certainly could use a huge update, and Netsurf needs some massive amounts of speed tweaks.
Actually if Netsurf wasn’t so slow on a 68060, the web would be really usable on it.
Then again I also have tons of ram for it
Okay, now the nostalgia makes me want to boot it up again.
Don’t forget iCab – there is still a version for 68K Macs.
The author appears to be running 7.0, but iCab 2.9.9 requires at least 7.5. Luckily: http://www.info.apple.com/support/oldersoftwarelist.html
System 7.5 runs horribly on a 68000 Mac with a SCSI hard drive (I used to run it on a Mac Classic) – I can imagine it runs like a complete dog on something using the profile drive. System 7.0 runs pretty well though.
Interesting. I used my 1987 Amiga on the internet daily from 2002-2008. I also emulated MacOS 8.1 on it.
16 colour screenshots here:
http://deskthority.net/resources/image/10276
http://eab.abime.net/attachment.php?attachmentid=14105&d=1182633502
Yeah, Amigas are amazing. I don’t have screen shots, but I still own the hardware I used to browse the internet using gopher in 1989 and later using NSCA Mosaic betas in 1992. I also used it to access the mainframes and minicomputers and run emulators for MacOS System 6 and System 7.
On an Amiga 2500 the Mac System 7 emulator ran faster than the Mac SE/30. Always with Multifinder installed. I eventually put the whole system on a 20-megabyte floptical.
Amigas are fun.
I used to run MacOS 8.1 using SheepShaver under BeOS. That was awesome. Nothing like having a pre-emptive multitasking OS running a co-operative OS as an application. This was on a Mac 9500 with dual processors, which was funny because MacOS really couldn’t use the second processor for anything useful.
I’ve hooked up my old Mac SE to the web…. well some time ago. I think it was via dial-up serial modem. I had to jigger some of the System Preferences and run software that technically wasn’t supposed to run on an SE but so help me I did it.
Not very useful to say the least but I had to try it.
Somewhere here I have a 486 that was pulled out of a ditch and yes it works with 20MB RAM.
The PSU has a really, really noisy fan which needs swapping out – old (AT) style PSU’s are rare now.
Anyone know where a translater ATX to AT lead can be found?
It has OpenBSD on it but I suspect even they no longer support 486 … hopefully NetBSD will tho’.
There is plenty of old AT style PSU’s knocking about, I have a big box full of them. Head over to Amibay or EAB and place a wanted ad, soon get one there.
I’ve seens some ATX->AT converters, but it’s definitively cheaper to replace the fan.
I’d rather use an 80286 or even a PC with 8086 CPU and an ISA network card and Archne web browser for MS-DOS.
Damn I wish I had that kind of time on my hands to mess with such a useless but interesting exercise.
http://blip.tv/pycon-us-videos-2009-2010-2011/pycon-2011-using-pyth…
It cannot be emphasized enough that the author is using a a Raspberry Pi to provide the PPP over serial connection.
Amazing! That Pi is hundreds of times more powerful than the Mac Plus is. I mean it even has a color video adapter.
Got most of my older collection equipped with 3Com 8 and 16-bit ISA cards with TCP/IP stack loaded in DOS grabbing IPv4 addresses. I pull them out every now and then and tinker on the net with them. Ah, the old DOS days…then there’s the early browsers on the 286-486 boxes running Windows 3.x and others.
Wish there was more activity on the ELKS linux project though. Would be nice to preserve a solid linux load for the older machines as well.