19 ms·
How I introduced a 27-year-old computer to the web
- Zardoz84 13y agoThis server is running in a real 80286 ! : http://www.mundoviejuno.com/ http://www.mundoviejuno.com/ Do a "cd info" and "type faq.txt" Also, there is more older machine connected to internet that these MAC : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ECnN7jdgA4 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ECnN7jdgA4
- bobbles 13y agoHmm when I opened this thread I didn't expect to be playing Pong on a 286 over the internet.. but here I am
- Stratoscope 13y agoUse the Source, Luke. view-source:http://www.mundoviejuno.com/pong.htm http://www.mundoviejuno.com/pong.htm http://www.mundoviejuno.com/pong.js http://www.mundoviejuno.com/pong.js You're playing Pong on your own machine, implemented in jQuery UI. The 286 is just serving the static files.
- kken 13y agoThe pong game does not look like anything a 286 could do. You have never used a 286 in real life, have you?
- arethuza 13y agoI've seen ~6 people using serial terminals to a "server" running Xenix on a 286 with SQL database applications - this was in late '88. My mouse probably has more computing power now.... :-)
- Stratoscope 13y agoWell, the server may be an 80286, but as its faq.txt says, that's not the machine you're talking to once the page is loaded. It's just a JavaScript console simulation: http://www.mundoviejuno.com/bios286.png http://www.mundoviejuno.com/bios286.png http://www.mundoviejuno.com/terminal.js http://www.mundoviejuno.com/terminal.js Of course it is cool to see an old 286 serving anything, even static pages like this...
- goeric 13y agoAll the 286 is serving you ~70kb of HTML5 and Javascript. The rest is done on your computer.
- lordgilman 13y agoThere was a dedicated fanbase for using Apple's System 6 day-to-day as recently as a decade ago or so. There's still a bunch of information up on the web and many of the links to 3rd parties at the bottom still work. http://www.vintagemacworld.com/sys6net.html http://www.vintagemacworld.com/sys6net.html
- losethos 13y agoI made God's temple. It is 64-bit and multicored, more modern than most other people's computers in 2008. God said 640x480 16 color. That is the only thing retro. C:\TAD\Text\BIBLE.TXT d, I have taken your brethren the Levites from among the children of Israel: to you they are given as a gift for the LORD, to do the service of the tabernacle of the congregation. 18:7 Therefore thou and thy sons with thee shall keep your priest's office for everything of the altar, and within the vail; and ye shall serve: I have given your priest's office unto you as a service of gift: and the stranger that cometh nigh shall be put to death. 18:8 And the LORD spake unto Aaron, Behold, I also have given
- fsckin 13y agoMac Plus has a CPU limited line speed of ~19 kilobits/sec? That's pretty amazing. My first was a Kaypro II with 64kb of RAM, 191kB floppy drive, and a 2.5MHz Z80. I just looked up some videos of them running and the memories came flooding back. Good times. Just imagine what computing power we'll have in another couple of decades and how silly what we have right now will seem.
- bane 13y agoI remember being absolutely devastated when the U.S. Robotics 28.8k modem I purchased was too fast for the 9.6kb/sec speed the 8250 UART on my 386sx. I had to sell it to somebody else and find an expensive internal model with its own UART. I think later they started selling internal modems without UARTS that just used the CPU to do the work, I wouldn't be surprised if that was the case here.
- pjmlp 13y agoIt happened to me with a graphics card regarding PCI bus speed.
- zenciadam 13y agoWhy didn't you just get a new serial board with the 16550A UART?
- bane 13y agoIt's been, many years...IIR the serial port was built into the motherboard.
- Nate75Sanders 13y agoHe's saying get an _extra_ serial board (put it into an ISA slot) that has the 16550 on it. Back then, this was a common way to get around what you're talking about.
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- girvo 13y agoI wish my Aunty hadn't thrown out our IBM Pentium PC @ 100mhz, and a whopping at the time 16mb of RAM. Seriously powerful machine for the time. I miss it...
- acheron 13y agoHeh. Posts like that make me want to pull a Four Yorkshiremen. "Sixteen megabytes? Luxury."
- rwhitman 13y agoThat Mac Plus is decked out. 4MB RAM, external hard drive, System 7. Jealous!
- huxley 13y agoWhen I bought mine similarly decked out (with a GCC PLP printer) the computer sales guy asked me "What are you doing with that much RAM? CAD for NASA?" We kept it for 9 years but it developed a quirk where the monitor wouldn't turn on. The only way to make it light up was to grab the Mac Plus and squeeze it, so everyone used to joke that my Apple computer was lonely and needed a hug.
- alan_cx 13y agoAh, I used to work as at a place that used a load of old PCs for training. Often some would refuse to boot. The solution was a sharp slap on the side of the case. I guess these PCs knew they were naughty.... ;)
- UrlichtZwei 13y agoI had a IIe with the dual disk drive. The right side drive didn't work and the left one's door had to be held closed with a large eraser. Ah, the memories.
- pfarrell 13y agoWhat useragent string did your browsing generate?
- kken 13y agoNice! But this machine is a supercomputer compared to a C64. Web server running on C64: http://www.c64web.com/ http://www.c64web.com/ OS with TCP stack running on C64: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contiki http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contiki
- danielweber 13y agoHow many of us does it take to slashdot a C64 web server? Two?
- TazeTSchnitzel 13y ago>The MacWeb developers apparently took a look at the HTTP 1.0 spec, decided, “Who would ever need name-based virtual hosting?” and left out the feature that 99% of the sites on the modern web relied on. Of course they did, it's not in HTTP/1.0, it's in HTTP/1.1.
- contingencies 13y agoHehe, that lept out at me as well. I guess we're old.
- TazeTSchnitzel 13y agoI'm not old, I'm 17! However, I recently had to implement a minimal HTTP client. I assumed Host: was in HTTP/1.0, but unfortunately it wasn't and I had to implement the minimal portion of HTTP/1.1 required for compliance.
- contingencies 13y agoKeep up the good work then :) At your age I spent my time reading TCP/IP Illustrated Volume 1: The Protocols and discovering unpublished operating system detection mechanisms in ARP and ICMP, putting them online and running home from school to see which governments' agencies had visited my website that day. They didn't bother hiding their tracks very much in those days.
- tjmc 13y agoThis post brought back great memories of connecting my Amiga to the net ~1991. The greatest triumph at the time was FTPing synth patches for my Yamaha DX7 from a server in Texas to my unix account at UWA, downloading it to the Amiga via zmodem as the author did, then uploading via the second serial port to the DX7 with a serial to din (MIDI) cable made with 2 sockets, 2 wires and a resistor. I couldn't really believe it when it all worked.
- JonnieCache 13y agoI bet it was still easier than programming the DX7 by hand though.
- weland 13y agoThis is wicked cool. Congratulations!
- iuguy 13y agoNice one! I like the proxy idea, any chance of it showing up on github? Not as old as this, but I wrote a guide nearly 10 years ago on installing Apache on Apple Unix (OSX is not the first Unix from Apple) on a Quadra[1]. [1] - http://www.snakeoillabs.com/downloads/aux-guide.pdf http://www.snakeoillabs.com/downloads/aux-guide.pdf
- tghw 13y agoI helped write the first version of it, which is mostly intact. I've included teuobk's changes. https://github.com/tghw/macproxy https://github.com/tghw/macproxy
- redact207 13y agoLove it, nice work. Had a bit of a chuckle when thinking of the site owners who see "Mac Plus, 1986" turn up on their user-agents log. Still renders better than IE6 though
- sneak 13y agoThe reason that HN looks okay on it is because HN is laid out with a series of nested tables, just like we did in MacWeb's heyday.
- Sharlin 13y agoYeah. Hooray for table layouting. I was at first surprised that the browser even understood tables, but it seems MacWeb 2.0 was released in 1996.
- tluyben2 13y agoExcellent work :) I created a network card for my MSX computer a year ago; it has less than half the cpu speed of this Plus. I really like working on that machine; adding hardware, writing bits of software. I said it before, but it's like a Bonzai tree. Because it's not really possible to do something commercial on it anymore, unlike on anything modern, my brain stops thinking commercially and that's a good feeling which I don't seem to have when touching any modern computer/board. Using the latter I always get business ideas and then it suddenly went from playing to work. Which is not bad because I like that, but sometimes I want to just play.
- userbinator 13y agoIt actually has a lot more processing power than the minimum required to "connect to the Internet" - TCP/IP and web servers have been implemented on microcontrollers with KBs of RAM. Parsing and rendering HTML, however, does need more than that... ...or maybe not, as this C64 web browser(!) shows: http://csdb.dk/release/?id=30400 http://csdb.dk/release/?id=30400
- DanBC 13y agoHere's a small TCP/IP stack. (http://tuxgraphics.org/electronics/200905/embedded-tcp-ip-stack.shtml http://tuxgraphics.org/electronics/200905/embedded-tcp-ip-st...) And here's a press release about a tiny web server, with a small stack. http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/1999-08/UoMa-Ucsg-100899.php http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/1999-08/UoMa-Ucsg-100... > In terms of technology, the achievement is not only in connecting a small computer on the Web, but also in the size of the network software that is running on the chip, according to Shri. The computer consists of an iPic TCP/IP stack running on 256 bytes of memory, using its own equally tiny operating system. Despite the small size, the TCP/IP stack is fully compliant with the requirements of the relevant standards. It is connected to the Internet through a serial port. Because the machine is a Web-server, it does not need a keyboard or display, but is operated from another computer using a Web connection.
- dustmop 13y agoA couple of years ago jwz did something similar, getting the original Mosaic browser to talk to the modern internet: http://www.jwz.org/blog/2008/03/happy-run-some-old-web-browsers-day/ http://www.jwz.org/blog/2008/03/happy-run-some-old-web-brows... Here as well, a proxy was used to get around the Host Header problem.
- dzhiurgis 13y agoI must say my Kindle experimental browser loads and renders websites... slower.
- leonk 13y agoOh great, another browser we need to test on! Thanks A LOT!
- JunkDNA 13y agoThis is just wonderful. About three and a half years ago I booted the first real computer from my childhood as well: a Commodore Amiga 500. I had one mission and that was to clone the hard drive so that I could get all the stuff off of it before time had its way with the bits (there are excellent Amiga emulators that can actually run old OS). Not having any experience soldering, I would have been crushed if I had experienced the failure of a capacitor. Fortunately, fate was kind to me. In that experience I learned how incredibly difficult it is to get things on and off of computers this old. Even though I lived through all the advances, my mind has a much rosier picture of the capabilities of old hardware than is actually true. Similar to this author, I had to rely on serial connections and some utilities developed by the Amiga emulation community running in Windows on an old PC to actually get it to work. And boy was it slow to move data. It took something like 48 hours to move about 80 megabytes of data. I was worried that was too long for such a machine to be running, but it held out. One of the partitions did have a tiny bit of corruption, but I was overall surprised to find most of the data intact. Sadly, my shoebox full of disks is probably never to be recovered. Both floppy drives seem to be failing and reading Amiga floppies on modern hardware is possible, but an expensive pain.
- dredge 13y agoI had almost the opposite experience! The big difference for me was that my old Amiga 600 has a PCMCIA card slot in it. I bought a modern (and very cheap) SD card reader that fit it and copied the necessary device driver over to the Amiga via a floppy. Thankfully it was already set up to read PC disks. After that copying files (and the entire HD image) to and from my PC was straightforward - the driver even supports VFAT long filenames. I was impressed with the whole thing. I had a similar issue with the Amiga's floppy drives, and was surprised to discover that some software called "AMI Alignment System" seemed to get the internal drive working fine again. I'm not sure if it worked some magic or just loosened up the drive a bit; either way it let me read my old disks again. It might be worth a try.
- colanderman 13y agoI had one mission and that was to clone the hard drive so that I could get all the stuff off of it before time had its way with the bits Pff, hard drive? In my day, everything we ever coded was stored on cassette tapes. We never needed the computer itself to get them back, just a tape player, special software [1], and the good fortune that solar flares hadn't eaten all the bits yet. [1] http://pokeystuff.com/cs1er/ http://pokeystuff.com/cs1er/
- Globz 13y agoThis amazing, now I just have to find my moms old Mac...its probably hidden somewhere in her basement!
- coldtea 13y ago>Did I mention it was slow? It was slow. Soooo sloooow. Slow slow slow. Like, minutes to read and render a page slow. This. People wax nostalgically all the time how fast running Star Writer or something was back in the day, and how "bloated" modern OSs have become, without understanding that those old PCs did 1/1000 of the things modern computers do, and even those simple stuff (running a text processor) was slow compared to today's standards...
- DanBC 13y agoBut how much of that stuff is actually needed, and how much is processor sucking prettiness? I think people justifiably feel a bit peeved that word processors ran acceptably fast on a 286, and run acceptably fast on a modern multi-core many GHz machine, and yet the added functionality isn't that useful for most people.
- brudgers 13y agoSure, for a program like Word, most users just know a small subset of the features. But they use many more of them because they rely on documents from people who know a different subset. A useful analogy would be library functions. A new Python doesn't need to know its C Language Interface to use a library that relies upon it.
- DanBC 13y agoWord (and the other Office software) are amazing, vary powerful, etc. And the OS that these modern softwares run on are full of features. And so software does do very much more than it used to do, and that's what people talk about when they talk about bloat. I could install a minimal Arch, with JWM, and Abiword, and run everything from RAM and get blazing fast operation. But it is odd that modern software, even though it's so feature rich, is also so slow.
- brudgers 13y agoIt's hard to say that Word is slow "performing x" when the alternative in many cases is not "performing x" at all. Put another way, even if I never embed spreadsheets in my documents, if Abiword cannot deal with the embeded Excel spreadsheet that my client sends me, then Word's ability to deal with it is not bloat. And if my alternative to editing the client's input numbers directly in the Word document she sent is to deal with a PDF and manipulate dumb text manually, then Word isn't running slowly.
- seefriek 13y agoReminds me I need to get my VAX-11/730 back on the net. Built in 1983. BSD 4.3. No GUI.
- theandrewbailey 13y agoI know everyone here will tell me to get off their lawn, but I just built a Pentium II computer about 2 months ago. I pulled most of it out of my uncles house when he died about two-ish years ago, and decided that its time to do something with this crap that's lying around. It's not quite the first computer in the house (a Compaq 486[1]), but it runs all the things it could. http://theandrewbailey.com/article/119/Project-Twentieth-Century-Planning http://theandrewbailey.com/article/119/Project-Twentieth-Cen... http://theandrewbailey.com/article/120/Project-Twentieth-Century-Resurrection http://theandrewbailey.com/article/120/Project-Twentieth-Cen... [1] it was (what would now be called) an all-in-one, and it came with some Windows 3.1 thing called TabWorks. And before anyone asks, no, I didn't program on the thing. Not every programmer has programmed since he was in diapers. Also, Windows didn't come with a programming environment back then and search engines sucked ass.
- djur 13y agoA Compaq all-in-one 486 with TabWorks was our family computer when I was a kid. You've evoked some very fond memories. Windows didn't come with a programming environment, but DOS had QBASIC, which is one of the best beginners' programming environments ever made. That machine had a long lifetime for us. We upgraded the RAM as far as it would go, replaced the HD... even added one of those AMD "586" coprocessors.
- theandrewbailey 13y agoCool! After we had it for a year or so, said uncle put Windows 95 on it. Lost the speakerphone app and Lode Runner Online during the process, but gained the late 90s web. I downloaded that Lode Runner from the creators site around 2004[1], and had my first retro computing moment. It wasn't upgraded (except possibly RAM), and we had it from about 1995/6 until 1999, when my dad got a Pentium 166 that was surplus from an office move. [1] http://www.daggert.net/Folio/Programming/Presage/LodeRunner/Loderunner1.htm http://www.daggert.net/Folio/Programming/Presage/LodeRunner/...
- iterable 13y agoAmazing. These screenshots really take me back...
- duncan_bayne 13y agoWow, I'm old: my first real computer was an Amstrad CPC 464. 64kB RAM (some of it used for video), 4MHz 8-bit CPU, built-in cassette player. I'm still developing for it in my spare time ... http://vimeo.com/70784619 http://vimeo.com/70784619 (very little progress yet)
- GigabyteCoin 13y agoI'm curious how long it would take that browser to infect the computer with a drive by download? Or if it's just so old and obsolete that not a malware programmer exists in this world to bother exploiting it's holes?
- renanbirck 13y agoNearly forever. You don't have JavaScript, most malware isn't designed for platforms that old etc...
- GigabyteCoin 13y agoRight, no scripts running means virtually no attack vectors. Perhaps overloading the buffer by downloading a large webpage? But that's about all I can muster.
- rohit6223 13y agocongratulations!
- eschaton 13y agoThe site www.lisa2.com is often served from an actual Lisa 2, which was released with the Mac in 1984. (Edit: Removed a bit about the Amiga being a knockoff, as mobile reading led me to conflate this article with the one about the Amiga emulator.)
- mcv 13y agoCool. But isn't his (Raspberry Pi) ethernet adapter a far more powerful computer than the computer it's adapting ethernet for?