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Browsing like it's 1994: Integrating a Mac SE, ImageWriter II into a modern LAN
- spacecadet 3y agoNice write up! I also have a Mac SE, but I found an Asente Ethernet card and installed that. Then ran ethernet to a small custom pcb that bridges to wireless, all tucked inside the original case. PS, Then run this on a rpi or something, kudos to this repo for dialing back the entire web :) https://github.com/tghw/macproxy https://github.com/tghw/macproxy
- blakespot 3y agoI have a Mac Plus I've expanded to 4MB and expanded with a 512MB SCSI HD and an Asante SCSI-to-Ethernet adapter by which it's wired to my LAN. I use an FTP programs to browse my Mac Studio via a little FTP server I've got running on it, if I want to install something new on the Mac Plus. Works pretty well. https://www.flickr.com/photos/blakespot/albums/72157604335935729 https://www.flickr.com/photos/blakespot/albums/7215760433593... I also have an Imagewriter II hooked to my Apple IIgs, but I did attach it to the Mac briefly for a test print.
- gattilorenz 3y agohttps://github.com/tenox7/wrp https://github.com/tenox7/wrp allows you to use modern js as well, as long as you can render images
- lolive 3y agoWould this middleware be relevant with Links [1]? I mean, could we browse heavy-on-js websites such as gmail, facebook ? [1]: http://links.twibright.com/ http://links.twibright.com/
- gattilorenz 3y agoI don't have a first-hand account here, but it should work as long as you run Links in graphics mode (but which machine runs Links in graphic mode and not another more enjoyable browser like, say, Netscape?)
- ralphc 3y agoThere's the PiSCSI which is a board that hooks in to a Pi's GPIO pins and acts like a SCSI interface to Macs. I have one and in addition to SCSI drives it can emulate a DynaTalk SCSI/Ethernet interface and use the Pi's wifi to talk to the Internet. I've done this with a Mac SE. It also will act like a AppleTalk file server using netatalk, it's an easy way to share files with other Macs on your local network.
- jdblair 3y agoLocaltalk was great, RS-422 is a low-cost long-distance serial transport, and Apple took advantage of that to build networking into the Macintosh. Our computer lab in high school used Farallon PhoneNET transceivers, which made it easy to daisy chain computers using low-cost Category 1 RJ-11 phone wiring. In college (Miami University), our computer lab also used PhoneNET (it really simplified wiring) combined with a Cayman Gatorbox to bridge to the campus TCP/IP backbone. By modern standards, painfully slow, but in 1992 the whole university was connected over a single 56K uplink to Columbus, so we hardly noticed. I have fond memories of playing Spectre with networked opponents over LocalTalk. To get online from our dorm rooms or offcampus, the only option was dial-up to the university phonebank, a 2400 baud terminal. Using the LocalTalk connection from a lab was much more responsive.
- jdblair 3y agoA few links to references in the above post: PhoneNet: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PhoneNET https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PhoneNET GatorBox: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GatorBox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GatorBox Spectre: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectre_(1991_video_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectre_(1991_video_game)
- retrac 3y agoIt was always some version of Phonenet (Localtalk over RJ-11 phone cabling) in my experience; I don't think I ever saw real Apple Localtalk hardware! The Appletalk protocols were excellent for small networks. It was truly plug-and-play. From the late 1980s, if there was more than one Mac in the same building, they were probably networked together. It really was as easy as connecting a cable between them. They would auto-configure, and off you went, sharing files or playing multi-user games. This was the same era of recompiling UNIX kernels to tweak NFS buffer parameters, and when the DOS world was mired in a nightmare of TSR packet drivers and Netware servers. Very ahead of its time. I do remember the impression however, that the protocols did not scale well beyond a small LAN.
- spitfire 3y agoThis is something worth looking into.What would a modern system built in 2023 with auto-configured everything look like? I don't mean take Linux with some added magic - that's MacOS. I mean a full modern distributed auto-configured, plug'n'play system. Sort of a modern AS/400 meets Macintosh.
- trimbo 3y ago> I attempted to use Netscape Navigator and iCab based on the list from here to no avail, Netscape Navigator crashed and iCab reported that it didn't have enough memory Well the SE is like 1986 technology that predates the web. NCSA Mosaic came out in 1993. I can't find the min spec for Mac Mosaic 1.x other than "System 7" but you could give it a try. Even Mosaic would have been mostly targeting Macs in wide deployment at the time. Those would be more like Mac II, Centris and Quadra machines with 68030s or 68040s with more RAM and built-in HDDs. Fun project!
- cptaffe 3y agoThanks for the advice. I found a copy of NCSA Mosaic 1.0.3 and it works on the Macintosh SE running System 7! The next version, Mosaic 2.0.1, needs 5MB of free memory. Mosaic does a better job handling larger pages like this blog post, and even chews through the inline SVG diagrams and renders just the text. My only complaint is that Mosaic uses the serif default font we're all used to, instead of the sans-serif default used by MacWeb, which makes it a little harder to read at such a low resolution. Added a section on it to the bottom of the article :)
- jandrese 3y agoI had a Mac LC with 4MB of RAM when I was a kid. It ran System 7 and was slightly too underpowered to run a web browser. I think you needed at least 6 MB to get Netscape 1.0 to run. Even if you did get it to run it would be painfully slow, especially if you're connected via a 14.4 modem as was common at the time. Loading a single image could take a full minute or more. Rule of thumb for Z-Modem transfers on a 14.4 modem was 100kB of data per minute.
- sk5t 3y ago14 minutes for an entire diskette’s content was magically fast, for the brief window of 14.4’s relevance.
- bombcar 3y ago“Time to download your storage” is an interesting metric, and it certainly takes longer to fill a terabyte drive from a 1gb/s connection that filling floppies with a modem.
- eschneider 3y agoWithout a doubt, Microsoft Word for Mac v5.1 is the best version of word, barn none.
- rwmj 3y agoMS Word 6 for Windows was a bit of a sweet spot. Enough features for a word processor without any extra fluff.
- blakespot 3y agoI didn't use a Windows PC for very long at home, but I did from 1994 to 1998, and I had Word 6 during that time. It was pretty nice. I've certainly use a number of more basic word processors in my time. :-) https://bytecellar.com/2016/06/05/a-look-back-at-three-decades-of-word-processors/ https://bytecellar.com/2016/06/05/a-look-back-at-three-decad...
- devilbunny 3y agoAlthough it had a lot of oddities and wasn't the world's most stable program, Ami Pro 3.1 for Windows had hands-down the easiest-to-use equation editor I've ever used. I wasn't doing really complicated math stuff, but was a chem major and the ability to do superscript and subscript directly above one another made any isotope notation very simple.
- intvocoder 3y ago[flagged]
- blakespot 3y agoThis was the first domain I'd ever seen with a .zip extension -- I didn't know it was on offer.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- stockerta 3y agoIs the site itself hosted on a Mac SE? It's slow as hell.
- Marvo99 3y agoIt's not cloud hosted, I'll tell you that. LMAO
- johnklos 3y agoYou say that like it's a bad thing.
- stockerta 3y agoYes it is, if half the images load only partialy or not at all.
- johnklos 3y agoWell, that's another matter. Slowness might come as a result of brokenness, but slowness by itself doesn't mean anything. I host a web site on an LC III+ which is often compiling and multiple tens of megabytes in to swap, so I know what slow looks like: http://elsie.zia.io/ http://elsie.zia.io/ (the page is about an LC II, but currently it's hosted by an LC III+)
- blakespot 3y agoIt loads fast and fine for me in the DC area of the states.
- cptaffe 3y agoI run it out of my closet. The blog is a small Go program deployed to a k8s cluster across a few ESXi VMs on an HP DL380 G7, behind a pfSense router also running as a VM and using HAProxy for TLS offloading. My connection is 1gbps symmetric. With no cache on my local network, Chrome reports the page loads fully in ~500ms, using the "slow 3G connection" performance tab preset it takes ~4s. If you're nowhere near Little Rock, Arkansas; that might be the issue. I don't yet use a CDN and it always loads the same resolution image ("high" quality JPEG, ~200kb apiece).
- johnklos 3y agoThis is awesome. I still keep around an ImageWriter II I found in a dumpster two decades ago because they're incredibly reliable and will print no matter what. Ribbons are plentiful and cheap, the printer doesn't care about the kind of paper, and even detailed QR codes and barcodes work fine if you blow them up a bit. But what's better than a printer that can work with almost any computer made in the last four decades? I just recently got a LocalTalk card for my ImageWriter II, and between this article and a recent one about custom ROMs for Macs (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37471321 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37471321), I'm considering having a dedicated m68k machine that can bridge AppleTalk on ethernet with LocalTalk. Good article!
- bombcar 3y agoI’ve seen some setups for old laser printers (HP LJ IIIp for life!) where a raspberry pie or similar low power computer controls a relay that can turn the printer on and off when not in use, as idle power on those beasts were moderately noticeable.
- blakespot 3y agoI wonder if a Mac Plus could do this equally well. I am guessing it can. Would be fun to print from the Mac Studio through the Plus to the Imagewriter II.
- firecall 3y agoWow, AsanteTalk! Thats a name I havent heard in a long time! Which reminds me, I was luck enough to be at one of the last pre-Jobs / transitional era Apple TechTalks in London for dealers. They showed new Stylewriters I recall, which never got released! Jobs killed all the printers before they shipped, and rightly so!
- donatj 3y agoI seem to recall my school district in the early-to-mid 90's having something like this set up with the very early Macintoshes. The Local Talk cable reminded me of times long forgotten. We could print to any printer in the district from the Chooser. I made very good use of this wasting paper around the district.
- comex 3y agoFYI for the author: > Chrome was built from scratch by Google, while Safari was originally derived from the KDE project's Konqueror browser engine, KHTML. This isn’t correct. Chrome’s engine, Blink, was forked in 2013 from WebKit, the engine used by Safari which was itself forked from KHTML.