4 ms·

Internet, even with modern TLS, is surprisingly usable on m68k machines. I recently played around with a contemporary web browser on my 25 MHz m68030 Amiga 3000

Internet, even with modern TLS, is surprisingly usable on m68k machines. I recently played around with a contemporary web browser on my 25 MHz m68030 Amiga 3000 with AmigaDOS 3.2.1, and it was almost usable. I bet it'd fly on an '040. ClassicHasClass has helped to keep SO MANY systems much more usable than the world would have us believe. Good work, and thank you!

kccqzy 3y ago
The Crypto Ancienne library which this uses has this to say about 68030: > Even built with -O3, our little NetBSD Macintosh IIci with a 25MHz 68030 and no L2 card took 22 seconds (give carl the -t option to disable timeouts) for a single short TLS 1.2 transaction to a local test server; a number of Internet hosts we tested it with simply cut the connection instead of waiting. Rude! Are you sure that's "almost usable"?
- classichasclass 3y ago
  (author of both) Yes, I'd agree with "almost." Some TLS sites will still work, if you're patient, and that penalty is all on the network side (there's no overhead if it's unencrypted, of course). On the Amiga side the UI/UX is probably pretty zippy once the data is actually transferred. The machine I ran and demoed it on is a clock-chipped 38MHz '040. Virtually everything will work there at an acceptable transfer speed, including TLS 1.3.
- jwells89 3y ago
  I wonder how practical it would be to build cards for these older machines that have hardware acceleration for various things like TLS, and perhaps also decoders for JPEG, PNG, etc. Also wonder if it would make more sense to implement this with decoder chips and a cheap ARM chip or an FPGA of some kind.
  - classichasclass 3y ago
    Well, that's more or less what things like the TCP/IP modems are already. You could just add an optional TLS layer on it. Go all the way and you'll get something like this: https://www.wic64.de/ https://www.wic64.de/
  - npunt 3y ago
    You might be interested in this web rendering proxy [1] which turns webpages into imagemapped GIFs for use on old systems [1] https://github.com/tenox7/wrp https://github.com/tenox7/wrp
    - Fnoord 3y ago
      That's cool! Another thing you could do is use say Mosh or Telnet to use Browsh. Browsh allows you to run Firefox in a terminal.
classichasclass 3y ago
Thanks, John!

kccqzy 3y ago

The Crypto Ancienne library which this uses has this to say about 68030: > Even built with -O3, our little NetBSD Macintosh IIci with a 25MHz 68030 and no L2 card took 22 seconds (give carl the -t option to disable timeouts) for a single short TLS 1.2 transaction to a local test server; a number of Internet hosts we tested it with simply cut the connection instead of waiting. Rude! Are you sure that's "almost usable"?

classichasclass 3y ago
(author of both) Yes, I'd agree with "almost." Some TLS sites will still work, if you're patient, and that penalty is all on the network side (there's no overhead if it's unencrypted, of course). On the Amiga side the UI/UX is probably pretty zippy once the data is actually transferred. The machine I ran and demoed it on is a clock-chipped 38MHz '040. Virtually everything will work there at an acceptable transfer speed, including TLS 1.3.
jwells89 3y ago
I wonder how practical it would be to build cards for these older machines that have hardware acceleration for various things like TLS, and perhaps also decoders for JPEG, PNG, etc. Also wonder if it would make more sense to implement this with decoder chips and a cheap ARM chip or an FPGA of some kind.
- classichasclass 3y ago
  Well, that's more or less what things like the TCP/IP modems are already. You could just add an optional TLS layer on it. Go all the way and you'll get something like this: https://www.wic64.de/ https://www.wic64.de/
- npunt 3y ago
  You might be interested in this web rendering proxy [1] which turns webpages into imagemapped GIFs for use on old systems [1] https://github.com/tenox7/wrp https://github.com/tenox7/wrp
  - Fnoord 3y ago
    That's cool! Another thing you could do is use say Mosh or Telnet to use Browsh. Browsh allows you to run Firefox in a terminal.

classichasclass 3y ago

Thanks, John!