
Plugging a 1986 Mac Plus into the Modern Web (2013) - franze
http://www.keacher.com/1216/how-i-introduced-a-27-year-old-computer-to-the-web/
======
simonster
When I was in elementary school and used to do this many years ago, the best
way to connect a Mac Plus to the web was to use a Mac new enough to support
Ethernet but old enough to support MacIP, and use IPNetRouter
([http://www.sustworks.com/site/downloads_classic.html](http://www.sustworks.com/site/downloads_classic.html))
to bridge TCP/IP over Ethernet to MacIP over LocalTalk, then use a serial
cable (or the old PhoneNet adapters) between the two computers. That requires
more old hardware to act as a bridge, but yields a blazing fast 230 kbps
network connection.

~~~
jamesfmilne
Crumbs, IPNetRouter, that's a blast from the past! :-)

~~~
Decade
Oh, yes, IPNetRouter was my first exposure to NAT. That horrible, infuriating
technology. But NAT works so much better than SOCKS proxies, especially since
my first attempt at "Internet Connection Sharing" was with a SOCKS proxy on
Windows 95. I remember when opening more than a couple copies of AOL Instant
Messenger meant that Windows ran out of sockets and we weren't able to load
any web pages.

------
bootload
_" A few weeks ago I was walking along the street in Cambridge, and in
someone's trash I saw what appeared to be a Mac carrying case. I looked
inside, and there was a Mac SE. I carried it home and plugged it in, and it
booted. The happy Macintosh face, and then the finder. My God, it was so
simple. It was just like ... Google."_ ~ Great Hackers, Paul Graham

So I'm going down a street and I see a Mac being thrown out :) ~
[https://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/14378861885](https://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/14378861885)

such a great article, thanks for @teuobk writing this & @franze for re-posting
this. It means I can have a crack at using the classic as a web client/proxy.
I'm still up to the _lets plug a modern keyboard and mouse_ stage but this is
a great push forward to connecting to the network, the hard bit: MacPlus and
TCP/IP.

------
tobr
> Hacker News as viewed by the Mac. Surprisingly readable given that MacWeb
> doesn’t support CSS.

Say what you will about table based layouts, but they sure are backwards
compatible.

~~~
JoshTriplett
CSS-based layouts, done right, still leave the underlying HTML heavily
semantic. And even with a few extra un-semantic divs and spans around, you can
just ignore those. The two biggest problems would be with sites that don't
bother to put content in a sensible semantic order (putting huge amounts of
sidebar/navigation content before the main content) and sites that generate
everything with JavaScript with no fallbacks.

~~~
UnoriginalGuy
> CSS-based layouts, done right, still leave the underlying HTML heavily
> semantic.

Could you give an example? I've done "tables" in CSS, and most of the time
you're using DIV to manage most of the positioning, which is non-semantic.

If there was a CSS table replacement which defaulted back to something which
looked like a table in HTML, I'd be impressed.

~~~
JoshTriplett
If what you're building is actually a table, use table markup; that's the
semantically correct markup. Just don't use it for something like a sidebar or
footer, or otherwise for positioning.

If you're building a navigation area, a callout, or some similar semantically
significant sidebar, take a look at
[https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/dom.html#sectioning-c...](https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/dom.html#sectioning-
content) for the nav and aside elements.

But even if you use a div, as long as the semantic content makes sense without
the div, you're fine. For instance, put one div with your article content
starting with an appropriate heading tag, and another div for your navigation.
Without the CSS, it still makes sense to have a section for content and a
section for navigation.

Also, there is actually CSS markup to make something look like a table, if
that's what you want; see [http://caniuse.com/#feat=css-
table](http://caniuse.com/#feat=css-table) for instance.

------
lisper
If you like stories about resurrecting old hardware you might enjoy this:

[http://blog.rongarret.info/2008/06/bugged-
life.html](http://blog.rongarret.info/2008/06/bugged-life.html)

~~~
aaronem
I'd enjoy it more if it ended with a link to a P-Lisp disk image. After all
that buildup, that lack is a real letdown.

~~~
lisper
Sorry.

[http://flownet.com/ron/plisp.html](http://flownet.com/ron/plisp.html)

I'll fix the blog post too.

~~~
aaronem
Thanks! Now I can play with it on my IIe, too.

------
userbinator
People have been able to access the Internet from a C64 (1982) - there's even
several browsers available (
[http://www.c64-wiki.de/index.php/Webbrowser](http://www.c64-wiki.de/index.php/Webbrowser)
) - and that's a far less powerful machine than this Mac. Compared to a 1MHz
6502 with a 64K address space, an 8MHz 68000 (32-bit!) with a few MB of RAM
and a 16MB flat address space is spacious.

Too bad the demoscene didn't really catch on with Macs for some reason... the
hardware is theoretically quite capable and I'm sure they could've done some
awesome effects with it if they tried.

~~~
Maakuth
The best Mac classic demo I've seen is this one:

[http://www.unrealvoodoo.org/projects/three-and-a-half-
inches...](http://www.unrealvoodoo.org/projects/three-and-a-half-inches-is-
enough)

------
ams6110
_There’s nothing quite like erotic literature at 2400 bps when you’re 13 years
old._

Ahh... the memories! Though for me it was 300 baud on an LSI ADM-3a with an
acoustic coupler.

[http://bytecollector.com/lsi.htm](http://bytecollector.com/lsi.htm)

~~~
gpvos
The link was to a different type of pr0n than I expected.

------
tsomctl
Another way to copy files over is to put the scsi hard driver in a modern
computer running Linux. There are some userspace tools to access the hfs
formatted hard drive. I had good luck with them.

------
PebblesHD
I would love to try something like this on my SE/30 but sadly it doesn't have
any useful software on it other than a 1989 copy of MS Word and lemmings. Any
ideas how to get some new files onto it without a terminal?

~~~
Decade
The SE/30 at least had a PC-compatible floppy drive. If you could find a disk
image with the desired software, a floppy disk, and a computer with a floppy
drive, then you could transfer software that way.

But a lot of Mac disk images might be in some weird Apple-proprietary Disk
Copy format. I think modern Disk Utility may be able to open them. I'm not
sure. I haven't tried anytime recently.

Jeff mentioned a Zip drive. You could try that, too, if you have USB and SCSI
Zip drives. Files are much more likely to transfer correctly if you use a Mac
instead of Windows.

~~~
mhurron
You should be able to find a image of a Mac disk with the software needed to
read FAT12 floppies.

And I do mean images that you can just use dd to write to the floppy. Then you
just need a USB floppy drive.

It has been a few years since I tried that though.

~~~
PebblesHD
fantastic, I'll give this a go as soon as I can. I have a floppy writer in my
server so I'll write it on that. Cheers guys

------
plasticbuddha
Good to know.. I have two SE/30s in my shed that I was pondering what to do
with...

------
pcurve
That keyboard sound is orgasmic.

------
jwise0
Looks like it got syndicated to The Kernel from the original ... here's the
original:

[http://www.keacher.com/1216/how-i-introduced-a-27-year-
old-c...](http://www.keacher.com/1216/how-i-introduced-a-27-year-old-computer-
to-the-web/)

And here's the HN discussion from last time:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6892935](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6892935)

~~~
dang
Thanks! Url changed from [http://kernelmag.dailydot.com/issue-
sections/features-issue-...](http://kernelmag.dailydot.com/issue-
sections/features-issue-sections/12228/mac-plus-modern-web/).

Pretty misleading of them to date it March 22, 2015, but perhaps that was just
a technical glitch.

------
pronoiac
This is familiar. The author originally posted it to his own site, and we
discussed it in 2013:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6892935](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6892935)

~~~
tghw
It was just syndicated by The Kernel [http://kernelmag.dailydot.com/issue-
sections/features-issue-...](http://kernelmag.dailydot.com/issue-
sections/features-issue-sections/12228/mac-plus-modern-web/)

Mods changed the URL to point to the original.

