7 ms·

Ask HN: Oldest piece of hardware a user could access the internet with?

If a minimal modification/add-on could permit an even older device, please include.

FrozenVoid 6y ago
https://medium.com/swlh/connecting-a-286-dos-pc-to-the-internet-through-a-serial-connection-in-2019-b93a422ff094 https://medium.com/swlh/connecting-a-286-dos-pc-to-the-inter...
johndoe0815 6y ago
"Accessing the internet" is a fairly broad term. In general, all machines supporting IPv4 and some sort of interface (UART for SLIP/PPP or Ethernet) can access the internet. However, older machines will not be able to use more modern services like ssh or the web due to compute power or memory limitations and you will obviously not be able to connect to IPv6-only hosts. So, for example a PDP11 running 2.9BSD (e.g. a 11/70 from 1975) should suffice, but there are other machines of similar vintage that support IPv4. You can also try putting a virtual PDP11 on the net using the simh emulator (http://simh.trailing-edge.com http://simh.trailing-edge.com) and 2.9BSD from TUHS (https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Distributions/UCB/2.9BSD/ https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Distributions/UCB/2.9BSD/).
- tbenst 6y ago
  Thank you for the history lesson! I had no idea IPv4 was so old
  - eloisant 6y ago
    Yes Internet is old, the web is more recent (1990)
  - throw0101a 6y ago
    * https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Where-Wizards-Stay-Up-Late/Katie-Hafner/9780684832678 https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Where-Wizards-Stay-Up... * https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/281818.Where_Wizards_Stay_Up_Late https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/281818.Where_Wizards_Sta...
- Hizonner 6y ago
  OK, but wait. 2.9BSD is from like 1982. And I think SLIP was later than that, and PPP was definitely much later than that. So you don't have a "pure" 1975 machine; you're using later software. What does "support" mean, then? If you're allowed to use software that's later than your hardware, then you can write a stack for almost anything, so the idea of a machine "supporting IPv4" becomes kind of meaningless. You need 576 bytes of memory for a packet buffer, plus your program. Any mid-sixties mainframe, maybe even older. If you do count the age of the software in deciding what's "supported", and you require that the TCP/IP stack run locally and communicate with modern computers without translation, then you'll have a hard limit at about 1980 or 1981, since the TCP and IPv4 protocols weren't defined until then, and there was therefore definitely no software. You could allow using NCP as a "legitimate Internet precursor" to TCP/IP, but if you do that there's no real reason not to just allow serial terminals as "legitimate precursors" to NCP. So 1980 or 1981 seems like the limit for a "pure" system with its own software. If you allow software newer than the hardware, but limit yourself to not writing that software, my guess is that the oldest thing would be a KA-10, which is a 1968 computer. RFC 801 says that as of 1981, there was a stack for TENEX, which you could run on a KA-10. You could at least do Telnet, maybe FTP. That's assuming you can find another old computer to gateway whatever ancient serial protocols it was using at the physical layer.
cable2600 6y ago
https://www.lemon64.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=61225 https://www.lemon64.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=61225
viraptor 6y ago
At least as old as Commodore 64: http://www.armory.com/~spectre/cwi/hl/shots.html http://www.armory.com/~spectre/cwi/hl/shots.html
- classichasclass 6y ago
  So, as the guy who wrote that, it's a cheat. It needs a host running a proxy which does the translation. Yes, I used it myself for some years.
  - fogihujy 6y ago
    Contiki has a native browser, though: https://www.c64-wiki.com/wiki/Contiki https://www.c64-wiki.com/wiki/Contiki
throwitaway1235 6y ago
I just realized the semi-stupidity of my question. I should have said "modern web", considering the ARPANET could be considered a type of "internet" (?) that ran using hardware from 1969? Thank you for the replies though, something to read up on.
- mixmastamyk 6y ago
  Modern web meaning bloated as hell, or motherfingwebsite and jquery? Minimums range from Pentium 90 to a ten year old i3. RAM would be a large factor as well for modern.
- laci27 6y ago
  modern web? Lynx Web browser is still being maintained!:) You can use it to search google or wikipedia. You can run Lynx on a 8086 CPU. If I remember correctly, Lynx can display images, if you download it one by one:) If you want video, but not go with an Amiga with a modern add-on card, you're probably looking at a Pentium PC.
- classichasclass 6y ago
  Do you mean something that, for example, could access TLS 1.2? I hacked up such a thing that works on a number of my old boxes, including NeXSTEP and A/UX. The oldest system I got it to work on is a Mac IIci running NetBSD without a cache card; it needs about 22 seconds to do a TLS 1.2 transaction with a local server, but it works. https://oldvcr.blogspot.com/2020/11/fun-with-crypto-ancienne-tls-for.html https://oldvcr.blogspot.com/2020/11/fun-with-crypto-ancienne...
  - bawolff 6y ago
    Huh, wonder where its spending all that time and if different ciphers would make a significant difference. I imagine many of the modern ciphers have hand tuned assembly for 64bit computers but probably not for older computers.
- iuguy 6y ago
  I regularly use the Web most days on an Amiga 4000, built in 1992. It's not perfect for everything, but I can use things like search engines, visit web sites over HTTPS etc. I mostly visit Amiga-specific sites that tend to have lower overheads. I've also visited sites like like Twitter, Facebook, CNN etc. in the past. It should be possible to use older machines to browse the web but it stops being about the machine and starts being more about availability of TLS libraries and rendering engines. In theory an Amiga 1000 (1985) should be able to connect to the Internet and may be able to run AmiSSL and IBrowse with the right upgrades. It might need custom hardware though. I think there's some jiggery pokery that'll allow older Macs dating back to 85 or maybe 84 (I'd be surprised to see an original 128kb Mac but the late 84 512kb model should work) to browse the web without modern TLS.
h2odragon 6y ago
"access"... If you wanted, an old vt100/vt220 or whatever other hardware serial terminal you like can be connected to a linux or other system and access a shell account with text browsers etc. In that scenario the terminal is "accessing the internet". (Did this with a Televideo 970 in 2007 iirc for the ebay listing where we sold it) If you want something to run an IP stack, then a 286 running `ka9qnos` is about as small as can do hardly anything useful, probably. There might be a c64 IP stack but at that point its getting technicality again; how much access and function counts? If you're looking for paranoid security in cheap hardware, 486 for absolute purists (runs linux handily, good luck with the graphics, matrox card ruled), and up to .. ppro? p3? or so if you're slightly less pure. Or get Sparc 5 or alpha or etc "exotic" hardware of that era and have an extra layer of obscurity plus years of unpatched security holes in any software you can make run today.
- throwitaway1235 6y ago
  I'm going to see if I can make a Facebook account using a Difference Engine over the weekend. Report back shortly.
  - Yetanfou 6y ago
    I think you should upgrade to an analytical engine to have any chance of success...
    - benibela 6y ago
      With the right skills, you can do it with an abacus
- toast0 6y ago
  I think some distributions have moved towards requiring a 686 class (ppro/pII) machine. It really depends on how much modern web you want to do. TLS is significant overhead on older machines. And javascript heavy sites can bring modern machines to a crawl.
- alexvoda 6y ago
mixmastamyk 6y ago
I started out in the 90s with telnet, gopher, et al on a Mac IIci, and a 386 that had Win 3.10 and Trumpet winsock installed. Sun/SGI were user friendly-ish. I suppose there was bigger iron available, and a few home computers that tcpip was backported to. But they'd be harder to come by.
ellock 6y ago
There has to be a joke about fingering and gophers in this somewhere!
- classichasclass 6y ago
  Yes, I am a huge proponent of gopher being period- and capability-appropriate for retrocomputing.
- indiafoodie 6y ago
  Don't be a WAIS guy!
fogihujy 6y ago
Pretty much anything with a serial port and a CPU should be able to get online, provided you have appropriate software. Most computers built after 1980 should be able to do it with some tinkering. Pretty much anything built after 1990 should be fairly trivial to get online. If you want something somewhat usable, then Lynx/Links running on whatever a modern Linux distro can boot on should suffice. I used a modem to get online with my Amiga 600 (7 MHz 68000, 2 + 4 MB RAM) in the 90's. It was perfectly possible to use things like IRC, eMule and a WWW browser on it, but the modern web will be quite unusable with aMosaic...
- forgotmypw77 6y ago
  one of the reasons i insist on http support, anything post-95 with a network card is barely a challenge to get online, and it,s nice to browse my own site from whatever device i want to use.
  - fogihujy 6y ago
    Yeah. With post-1995 hardware it's mostly a matter of installing a network card + driver, and possibly a TCP/IP stack and a browser, depending on the OS.
ecef9-8c0f-4374 6y ago
> accessing the internet is too broad. A C64 with a modem can access IRC and BBS > minimal modification/add-on This is a bit broad too. Every modern "add-on" has more power most of the old computer they are attached on. You could run a proxy on the add-on, that would shrink pictures, html and remove https. Or even simpler. The add-on could do all the computation and just use the old hardware to show the result.
mikewarot 6y ago
I suspect the oldest, and likely the first machine to properly support it would be the Xerox Alto, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_Alto https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_Alto Ethernet and the Alto both can from PARC.
jankotek 6y ago
Human brain. IP protocol is computable by humans. There is even RFC for transferring packets over pigeons.
contravariant 6y ago
As of RFC 1149 [1], I guess a pigeon? [1]: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1149 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1149
- disgu 6y ago
  But a pigeon can only live for about six years.
  - codeulike 6y ago
    'Domesticated pigeon 1.0' was developed about 10,000 years ago and although none of the first run are still around, the model design has been pretty much the same since.
heikkilevanto 6y ago
Not sure if this counts, but I wrote my first program in 1972, when I was 8 years old. On an old mechanical teletype, connected via an acoustically coupled modem to a mainframe in the other end of the city. I only saw the BASIC interpreter, but my father told that they were doing some calculations abroad, even in the US, where he could get cheaper night time when it was daytime in Finland. Edit: Those remote jobs were most likely batch jobs, and I am not sure how they got the stuff over, may not have been over a network connection.
rzzzt 6y ago
For a more modern (but still old) machine, Browservice might be of help: - https://github.com/ttalvitie/browservice https://github.com/ttalvitie/browservice - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23595430 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23595430
ntnlabs 6y ago
I remember some implementations of TCP/IP stack on ZX, but don't remember if it was just a plan or finished product and I think they wrote about lynx as a browser?
cestith 6y ago
What amount of assistance are we talking? There are IP stacks for IBM PC with DOS and for C64. I have Ethernet for my 5150. I have a device that turns a Raspberry Pi into a peripheral for a Ti-99/4A which can provide an Internet connection to the TI machine. I have another device that uses an ESP2866 or so to get anything with a serial port onto wifi. I a DECMate III which is a PDP-8 class machine that can get on the web. I have a couple of Livingston Portmaster 2e access concentrators that can give dozens of systems IP access via SLIP, PPP, or bare terminal-to-IP access. My 286 with OS/2 works fine for graphical browsing, but anything approaching modern TLS ciphers are a performance nightmare. At a minimum, you're looking at as old as the 68020 Macs and the 386 PCs. The PDP-10, PDP-11, Amiga 1000, the earliest Sun machines (68k, pre-Sparc), and similar age machines from the 1980s and early 1990s having a really reasonable amount of functionality with the right options, OS version, drivers, and software.
2rsf 6y ago
Dumb devices can also be controlled to some degree- power can be easily switched using smart plugs, and you can convert an Arduino to use its GPIOs to "press" buttons

If a minimal modification/add-on could permit an even older device, please include.

https://medium.com/swlh/connecting-a-286-dos-pc-to-the-internet-through-a-serial-connection-in-2019-b93a422ff094 https://medium.com/swlh/connecting-a-286-dos-pc-to-the-inter...

johndoe0815 6y ago

"Accessing the internet" is a fairly broad term. In general, all machines supporting IPv4 and some sort of interface (UART for SLIP/PPP or Ethernet) can access the internet. However, older machines will not be able to use more modern services like ssh or the web due to compute power or memory limitations and you will obviously not be able to connect to IPv6-only hosts. So, for example a PDP11 running 2.9BSD (e.g. a 11/70 from 1975) should suffice, but there are other machines of similar vintage that support IPv4. You can also try putting a virtual PDP11 on the net using the simh emulator (http://simh.trailing-edge.com http://simh.trailing-edge.com) and 2.9BSD from TUHS (https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Distributions/UCB/2.9BSD/ https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Distributions/UCB/2.9BSD/).

tbenst 6y ago
Thank you for the history lesson! I had no idea IPv4 was so old
- eloisant 6y ago
  Yes Internet is old, the web is more recent (1990)
- throw0101a 6y ago
  * https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Where-Wizards-Stay-Up-Late/Katie-Hafner/9780684832678 https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Where-Wizards-Stay-Up... * https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/281818.Where_Wizards_Stay_Up_Late https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/281818.Where_Wizards_Sta...
Hizonner 6y ago
OK, but wait. 2.9BSD is from like 1982. And I think SLIP was later than that, and PPP was definitely much later than that. So you don't have a "pure" 1975 machine; you're using later software. What does "support" mean, then? If you're allowed to use software that's later than your hardware, then you can write a stack for almost anything, so the idea of a machine "supporting IPv4" becomes kind of meaningless. You need 576 bytes of memory for a packet buffer, plus your program. Any mid-sixties mainframe, maybe even older. If you do count the age of the software in deciding what's "supported", and you require that the TCP/IP stack run locally and communicate with modern computers without translation, then you'll have a hard limit at about 1980 or 1981, since the TCP and IPv4 protocols weren't defined until then, and there was therefore definitely no software. You could allow using NCP as a "legitimate Internet precursor" to TCP/IP, but if you do that there's no real reason not to just allow serial terminals as "legitimate precursors" to NCP. So 1980 or 1981 seems like the limit for a "pure" system with its own software. If you allow software newer than the hardware, but limit yourself to not writing that software, my guess is that the oldest thing would be a KA-10, which is a 1968 computer. RFC 801 says that as of 1981, there was a stack for TENEX, which you could run on a KA-10. You could at least do Telnet, maybe FTP. That's assuming you can find another old computer to gateway whatever ancient serial protocols it was using at the physical layer.

cable2600 6y ago

https://www.lemon64.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=61225 https://www.lemon64.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=61225

viraptor 6y ago

At least as old as Commodore 64: http://www.armory.com/~spectre/cwi/hl/shots.html http://www.armory.com/~spectre/cwi/hl/shots.html

classichasclass 6y ago
So, as the guy who wrote that, it's a cheat. It needs a host running a proxy which does the translation. Yes, I used it myself for some years.
- fogihujy 6y ago
  Contiki has a native browser, though: https://www.c64-wiki.com/wiki/Contiki https://www.c64-wiki.com/wiki/Contiki

throwitaway1235 6y ago

I just realized the semi-stupidity of my question. I should have said "modern web", considering the ARPANET could be considered a type of "internet" (?) that ran using hardware from 1969? Thank you for the replies though, something to read up on.

mixmastamyk 6y ago
Modern web meaning bloated as hell, or motherfingwebsite and jquery? Minimums range from Pentium 90 to a ten year old i3. RAM would be a large factor as well for modern.
laci27 6y ago
modern web? Lynx Web browser is still being maintained!:) You can use it to search google or wikipedia. You can run Lynx on a 8086 CPU. If I remember correctly, Lynx can display images, if you download it one by one:) If you want video, but not go with an Amiga with a modern add-on card, you're probably looking at a Pentium PC.
classichasclass 6y ago
Do you mean something that, for example, could access TLS 1.2? I hacked up such a thing that works on a number of my old boxes, including NeXSTEP and A/UX. The oldest system I got it to work on is a Mac IIci running NetBSD without a cache card; it needs about 22 seconds to do a TLS 1.2 transaction with a local server, but it works. https://oldvcr.blogspot.com/2020/11/fun-with-crypto-ancienne-tls-for.html https://oldvcr.blogspot.com/2020/11/fun-with-crypto-ancienne...
- bawolff 6y ago
  Huh, wonder where its spending all that time and if different ciphers would make a significant difference. I imagine many of the modern ciphers have hand tuned assembly for 64bit computers but probably not for older computers.
iuguy 6y ago
I regularly use the Web most days on an Amiga 4000, built in 1992. It's not perfect for everything, but I can use things like search engines, visit web sites over HTTPS etc. I mostly visit Amiga-specific sites that tend to have lower overheads. I've also visited sites like like Twitter, Facebook, CNN etc. in the past. It should be possible to use older machines to browse the web but it stops being about the machine and starts being more about availability of TLS libraries and rendering engines. In theory an Amiga 1000 (1985) should be able to connect to the Internet and may be able to run AmiSSL and IBrowse with the right upgrades. It might need custom hardware though. I think there's some jiggery pokery that'll allow older Macs dating back to 85 or maybe 84 (I'd be surprised to see an original 128kb Mac but the late 84 512kb model should work) to browse the web without modern TLS.

h2odragon 6y ago

"access"... If you wanted, an old vt100/vt220 or whatever other hardware serial terminal you like can be connected to a linux or other system and access a shell account with text browsers etc. In that scenario the terminal is "accessing the internet". (Did this with a Televideo 970 in 2007 iirc for the ebay listing where we sold it) If you want something to run an IP stack, then a 286 running `ka9qnos` is about as small as can do hardly anything useful, probably. There might be a c64 IP stack but at that point its getting technicality again; how much access and function counts? If you're looking for paranoid security in cheap hardware, 486 for absolute purists (runs linux handily, good luck with the graphics, matrox card ruled), and up to .. ppro? p3? or so if you're slightly less pure. Or get Sparc 5 or alpha or etc "exotic" hardware of that era and have an extra layer of obscurity plus years of unpatched security holes in any software you can make run today.

throwitaway1235 6y ago
I'm going to see if I can make a Facebook account using a Difference Engine over the weekend. Report back shortly.
- Yetanfou 6y ago
  I think you should upgrade to an analytical engine to have any chance of success...
  - benibela 6y ago
    With the right skills, you can do it with an abacus
toast0 6y ago
I think some distributions have moved towards requiring a 686 class (ppro/pII) machine. It really depends on how much modern web you want to do. TLS is significant overhead on older machines. And javascript heavy sites can bring modern machines to a crawl.
alexvoda 6y ago

mixmastamyk 6y ago

I started out in the 90s with telnet, gopher, et al on a Mac IIci, and a 386 that had Win 3.10 and Trumpet winsock installed. Sun/SGI were user friendly-ish. I suppose there was bigger iron available, and a few home computers that tcpip was backported to. But they'd be harder to come by.

ellock 6y ago

There has to be a joke about fingering and gophers in this somewhere!

classichasclass 6y ago
Yes, I am a huge proponent of gopher being period- and capability-appropriate for retrocomputing.
indiafoodie 6y ago
Don't be a WAIS guy!

fogihujy 6y ago

Pretty much anything with a serial port and a CPU should be able to get online, provided you have appropriate software. Most computers built after 1980 should be able to do it with some tinkering. Pretty much anything built after 1990 should be fairly trivial to get online. If you want something somewhat usable, then Lynx/Links running on whatever a modern Linux distro can boot on should suffice. I used a modem to get online with my Amiga 600 (7 MHz 68000, 2 + 4 MB RAM) in the 90's. It was perfectly possible to use things like IRC, eMule and a WWW browser on it, but the modern web will be quite unusable with aMosaic...

forgotmypw77 6y ago
one of the reasons i insist on http support, anything post-95 with a network card is barely a challenge to get online, and it,s nice to browse my own site from whatever device i want to use.
- fogihujy 6y ago
  Yeah. With post-1995 hardware it's mostly a matter of installing a network card + driver, and possibly a TCP/IP stack and a browser, depending on the OS.

ecef9-8c0f-4374 6y ago

> accessing the internet is too broad. A C64 with a modem can access IRC and BBS > minimal modification/add-on This is a bit broad too. Every modern "add-on" has more power most of the old computer they are attached on. You could run a proxy on the add-on, that would shrink pictures, html and remove https. Or even simpler. The add-on could do all the computation and just use the old hardware to show the result.

mikewarot 6y ago

I suspect the oldest, and likely the first machine to properly support it would be the Xerox Alto, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_Alto https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_Alto Ethernet and the Alto both can from PARC.

jankotek 6y ago

Human brain. IP protocol is computable by humans. There is even RFC for transferring packets over pigeons.

contravariant 6y ago

As of RFC 1149 [1], I guess a pigeon? [1]: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1149 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1149

disgu 6y ago
But a pigeon can only live for about six years.
- codeulike 6y ago
  'Domesticated pigeon 1.0' was developed about 10,000 years ago and although none of the first run are still around, the model design has been pretty much the same since.

heikkilevanto 6y ago

Not sure if this counts, but I wrote my first program in 1972, when I was 8 years old. On an old mechanical teletype, connected via an acoustically coupled modem to a mainframe in the other end of the city. I only saw the BASIC interpreter, but my father told that they were doing some calculations abroad, even in the US, where he could get cheaper night time when it was daytime in Finland. Edit: Those remote jobs were most likely batch jobs, and I am not sure how they got the stuff over, may not have been over a network connection.

rzzzt 6y ago

For a more modern (but still old) machine, Browservice might be of help: - https://github.com/ttalvitie/browservice https://github.com/ttalvitie/browservice - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23595430 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23595430

ntnlabs 6y ago

I remember some implementations of TCP/IP stack on ZX, but don't remember if it was just a plan or finished product and I think they wrote about lynx as a browser?

cestith 6y ago

What amount of assistance are we talking? There are IP stacks for IBM PC with DOS and for C64. I have Ethernet for my 5150. I have a device that turns a Raspberry Pi into a peripheral for a Ti-99/4A which can provide an Internet connection to the TI machine. I have another device that uses an ESP2866 or so to get anything with a serial port onto wifi. I a DECMate III which is a PDP-8 class machine that can get on the web. I have a couple of Livingston Portmaster 2e access concentrators that can give dozens of systems IP access via SLIP, PPP, or bare terminal-to-IP access. My 286 with OS/2 works fine for graphical browsing, but anything approaching modern TLS ciphers are a performance nightmare. At a minimum, you're looking at as old as the 68020 Macs and the 386 PCs. The PDP-10, PDP-11, Amiga 1000, the earliest Sun machines (68k, pre-Sparc), and similar age machines from the 1980s and early 1990s having a really reasonable amount of functionality with the right options, OS version, drivers, and software.

2rsf 6y ago

Dumb devices can also be controlled to some degree- power can be easily switched using smart plugs, and you can convert an Arduino to use its GPIOs to "press" buttons