3 ms·

I wish it were possible to still use them for anything useful... I'm slowly working on a new ssh client for 7/8/9, but there's no way a modern browser could be

I wish it were possible to still use them for anything useful... I'm slowly working on a new ssh client for 7/8/9, but there's no way a modern browser could be ported, and the CPUs would be too weak for the modern web

asveikau 6y ago
I have a quadra that I haven't booted in several years, running A/UX. I also used to own some other old world ppcs. I remember a decade ago or more, ssh was very slow on them. Hope your client has figured out how to make that not suck. I also think it'd be kinda cool to see an X window manager that takes some hints from classic Mac.
- Palomides 6y ago
  I don't really expect the 68k macs will be fast enough to even set up a connection without timeouts, but it's hard to say until I do some more work
- kitsunesoba 6y ago
  >I also think it'd be kinda cool to see an X window manager that takes some hints from classic Mac. A full, lightweight Classic Mac OS clone DE would be amazing, though I suspect that it might have to cut out X11/Wayland in favor of something more direct to get the same feeling of snappiness and "one piece construction" that original Mac OS had.
  - asveikau 6y ago
    I disagree with this. Hardware is so crazy good now relative to then, that you could put layers upon layers of abstraction (including say a 68K mac emulator compiled to javascript and running inside Firefox on x11) and the old-school gui tasks of the 90s still purr. If apple could do it at 25mhz or whatever, a modern amd64 machine should be able to handle it no matter the overhead of the windowing system.
    - mistrial9 6y ago
      great thought, but (!) I have to say from personal experience, you can bring practically any system, of any horsepower, to a crawl, with overweight layering and dispatching..
      - asveikau 6y ago
        That's true. So, I would say there is an unspoken emphasis in my comment that you also need to do it "right". Personally my X setup looks a lot like the 90s, and when people say X performs so terribly, I really don't see it. The hardware runs circles around what I used to run X on 20 years ago, and the software setup isn't really very different. But most people when they use X or think of X are thinking of a really heavy desktop environment.
rvense 6y ago
Tell us more about that. Is it based on some encryption library?
- Palomides 6y ago
  yeah, I'm using mbedtls + libssh2, built with the retro68 toolchain it's not exactly plug and play, there are a variety of small and large challenges (like no sockets)
  - SyneRyder 6y ago
    Dumb newbie question, but does it handle TLS 1.3 okay? I was using my Pismo G3 on the weekend and frustrated at how much of the web was inaccessible just because Mac OS 10.4 lacks modern TLS. The machine itself worked quite well with Opera for sites that were still HTTP compatible. If you've solved that for 68k machines, maybe it will be possible to get it working for software on PPC machines too.
    - asveikau 6y ago
      It seems like the continued evolution of TLS is a huge barrier to retrocomputing with current networks. Relatedly, I happened to be writing some TLS code on a bit of a side project and I was curious on what old OSs I could get it on with minimal effort. I found the builtin SChannel on Windows XP for example cannot interact with www.google.com at all, or even some of my own TLS-enabled hosts that I maintain myself. For projects with source available or that you're hacking on, it's not very hard to build libressl. It's a shame that some of these older OSs probably can't have support bolted on for 1st party APIs. Of course, they also are probably full of security holes and you probably don't want them on the public internet anyway. Another barrier some day will be that those old systems are ipv4-only.
      - duskwuff 6y ago
        > It's a shame that some of these older OSs probably can't have support bolted on for 1st party APIs. What first-party APIs? As far as I'm aware, classic Mac OS never had native SSL/TLS support -- every application which needed it (mostly web browsers in that era) included their own implementation.

asveikau 6y ago

I have a quadra that I haven't booted in several years, running A/UX. I also used to own some other old world ppcs. I remember a decade ago or more, ssh was very slow on them. Hope your client has figured out how to make that not suck. I also think it'd be kinda cool to see an X window manager that takes some hints from classic Mac.

Palomides 6y ago
I don't really expect the 68k macs will be fast enough to even set up a connection without timeouts, but it's hard to say until I do some more work
kitsunesoba 6y ago
>I also think it'd be kinda cool to see an X window manager that takes some hints from classic Mac. A full, lightweight Classic Mac OS clone DE would be amazing, though I suspect that it might have to cut out X11/Wayland in favor of something more direct to get the same feeling of snappiness and "one piece construction" that original Mac OS had.
- asveikau 6y ago
  I disagree with this. Hardware is so crazy good now relative to then, that you could put layers upon layers of abstraction (including say a 68K mac emulator compiled to javascript and running inside Firefox on x11) and the old-school gui tasks of the 90s still purr. If apple could do it at 25mhz or whatever, a modern amd64 machine should be able to handle it no matter the overhead of the windowing system.
  - mistrial9 6y ago
    great thought, but (!) I have to say from personal experience, you can bring practically any system, of any horsepower, to a crawl, with overweight layering and dispatching..
    - asveikau 6y ago
      That's true. So, I would say there is an unspoken emphasis in my comment that you also need to do it "right". Personally my X setup looks a lot like the 90s, and when people say X performs so terribly, I really don't see it. The hardware runs circles around what I used to run X on 20 years ago, and the software setup isn't really very different. But most people when they use X or think of X are thinking of a really heavy desktop environment.

rvense 6y ago

Tell us more about that. Is it based on some encryption library?

Palomides 6y ago
yeah, I'm using mbedtls + libssh2, built with the retro68 toolchain it's not exactly plug and play, there are a variety of small and large challenges (like no sockets)
- SyneRyder 6y ago
  Dumb newbie question, but does it handle TLS 1.3 okay? I was using my Pismo G3 on the weekend and frustrated at how much of the web was inaccessible just because Mac OS 10.4 lacks modern TLS. The machine itself worked quite well with Opera for sites that were still HTTP compatible. If you've solved that for 68k machines, maybe it will be possible to get it working for software on PPC machines too.
  - asveikau 6y ago
    It seems like the continued evolution of TLS is a huge barrier to retrocomputing with current networks. Relatedly, I happened to be writing some TLS code on a bit of a side project and I was curious on what old OSs I could get it on with minimal effort. I found the builtin SChannel on Windows XP for example cannot interact with www.google.com at all, or even some of my own TLS-enabled hosts that I maintain myself. For projects with source available or that you're hacking on, it's not very hard to build libressl. It's a shame that some of these older OSs probably can't have support bolted on for 1st party APIs. Of course, they also are probably full of security holes and you probably don't want them on the public internet anyway. Another barrier some day will be that those old systems are ipv4-only.
    - duskwuff 6y ago
      > It's a shame that some of these older OSs probably can't have support bolted on for 1st party APIs. What first-party APIs? As far as I'm aware, classic Mac OS never had native SSL/TLS support -- every application which needed it (mostly web browsers in that era) included their own implementation.