I met 27-year-old Mac to the Internet

Restoring an old computer - this is the restoration of a classic car: something from which the modern world trembles. So it was with my first real computer, my Mac Plus, when I decided to bring it forward three decades and to introduce to the Internet.

By modern standards, moh Mac rather weak machine. Specifications pale in comparison even with my Kindle: 8 MHz CPU, 4MB RAM, hard disk volume 50 MB, and the black and white screen is 512 x 384 pixels. My current PC is about 200 000 times faster, even without GPU account. However, a Mac Plus, I lost "computer teeth" as a child. With him I met hard drives, modems, and the Internet.

Yes, in a sense, my Mac was ready to work with the internet, first with BBS, and then use the Lynx through dial-up session. (There's nothing interesting, just as erotic literature to 2400 bps when you're 13 years old). What I never once did, so it did not try to run it on TCP / IP stack.

How difficult it is to fix what is not working as it should be? You have no idea

At first glance, everything started smoothly. I had a motherboard on my computer. It is well preserved, lying quietly in the basement since the mid-1990s. I took her and an external hard drive, flicked the power switch, and was happy to see how my Mac back to life. Hard disk groaned in protest when first unwound, but then fell silent, and all the data was intact. At least for the first few minutes.

I recalled the beautiful game of my youth Glider, when suddenly there was a loud bang and there was a smell of smoke. In a panic, I turned off the power and pulled the plugs. In fact, to find the source of pungent odor is gone a long time: an external hard drive. The impact of the current after a long downtime led to the failure of one of the capacitors in the external storage device.

Fortunately, Digikey still sell exactly the same capacitors (!) And I worked with a soldering iron, returned to work after a few days. By working to create a network for your Mac Plus!

To achieve its goal, I needed a web browser, TCP / IP stack. Well, it was necessary to come up with a way to connect the Mac to my home network. Find web browser it was relatively easy thanks to the guys sitting on the long forgotten the FTP-sites in the dusty corners of the Internet. Brazuer MacWeb 2.0 and was old enough to work on my Plus and quite new to render HTML and HTTP. Sort of. But we'll get to that in a minute.

In addition, there was MacTCP version that was able to work (somehow, but it does not matter) to the system 7.0. It does not support such niceties as DHCP, but MacWeb was happy to use it, and this installation does not cause a problem because it lacked only stack TCP / IP.

Mac make a physical connection to the network has been more challenging. In Mac Plus there is no Ethernet port, and things like Wi-Fi in those years did not exist. A couple of companies do SCSI-Ethernet Adapters about 15 years ago, but to find them for sale was practically impossible. For a while I was thinking about this problem, and it occurred to me that I can use the serial port and PPP or SLIP to communicate with the outside world. As a phone call without a modem.

I installed the Raspberry Pi and connect it to a number of CAT-5 from the router. Using a variety of older cards, I was able to get a serial cable, which earned between Pi and Mac.

On the software side, I gave up after several unsuccessful attempts to find a PPP client that will work on Plus and primitive server PPP, called for SLiRP Pi. Documentation MacTCP, MacPPP and SLiRP surprisingly were still available. After a bit of trouble with the configuration, I was able to get MacTCP working with MacPPP, MacPPP working with SLiRP, SLiRP using an Ethernet connection, and so on through the router and exit to the Internet. Since the serial device Mac Plus on serial I / O required intensive the processor, was limited to the capacity of 19 kbit / s, but 19 is still a lot better than nothing.

Now you might ask, "Wait, how did you get all that software, which are not supported by developers?" Good question! Drive Mack was so old that it was incompatible with modern computer disks. What is really there, even on my modern computers the drive was not at all. I tried to use 100 MB ZIP-diskette to work with the ZIP-Drive, which supported intefreysy USB and SCSI-1. Still, I managed to get Mac to work with ZIP-disks (and eventually use one of them in the boot drive), even though my Windows-PC reads HFS floppy using some programs. But there was a catch. Every attempt to move data from PC to Plus to anything not lead, but I have damaged files on the Zip-disk.

I found an old terminal emulator Microphone, which was already installed on the Mac. Microphone ZMODEM supported for file transfer, c whom you probably know, if you remember BBS. Thus, to transfer files on a Mac, I have moved the necessary files from my computer to the Raspberry Pi, and Pi is then connected to the serial port. Microphone loaded on the Mac as a terminal, and I downloaded the Minicom at Pi with a Mac. I nervously introduced the necessary keys for transmission Zmodem at Minicom, I select a file and press ENTER. Minicom is grateful to "peep" and dialogue "Save incoming file?" Appeared on the Mac. After a while, I found that the new software running on my old Mac Plus. Hooray!

So, Raspberry Pi, MacTCP and MacWeb - everything is in place, it's time to surf the web! Is not it? Is not it?! Not. Not yet.

Apparently, the developers MacWeb, by looking at the HTTP 1.0 specification, decided: "Did anyone ever You need virtual hosting based domain name? "And do not take into account that 99% of the sites used in the modern web it is them. Lack of support for virtual hosts means that you can use for most sites path only server IP-address, and was cut off. Oh, and HTTPS, cookies and CSS were not invented.

Hell!

I told him about the problem of his friend Tyler, and was surprised when he found the decision in haste, proxy filtering using Python, Requests, Flask and Beautiful Soup. The key to all this was that MacWeb will include a complete address with a host name when creating a proxy request. Queries open URL, SSL and manage cookies. BeautifulSoup MacWeb helps open things like CSS, Javascript, images and DIVs. A Flask makes proxy process the request and send the results back on the Mac.

And this, my friends, was enough to surf the Web. It looked something like a modern mobile browser.

Of course, it all worked pretty darn slow, but it worked! Download data and pages and links are clickable. Did I mention it was slow? It was very slow. So medleeeenno. Slowly, slowly, slowly. Minutes to read and display the page. But what's the difference? The aim was to introduce Mac to the Internet. And dating a success.

(Via)