>"You can download browsers for long gone operating systems"
Unfortunately, many simply don't work for 99.9% of the modern Web due to it requiring TLS 1.3. For example, on Windows 98,there is a myth of some Opera version that had TLS 1.3 support, but I haven't had a chance of finding it. TLS 1.2 is the latest one can get
It is quite ironic that it is not JavaScript, or the modern dynamic Web features that prove most difficult to back port to old operating systems, but SSL.
Of course there is the Web proxy that renders modern Web as an image map accessible even to the oldest computers, but this is "cheating" as you really are using a modern OS to sort of pre-digest content. You need a modern OS constantly running to use your vintage machine just in case you might need to download some file from the Web.
I bumped into this a few months back when toying with the idea of spinning up a Win2K virtual machine to keep some legacy software alive. I didn't expect browsing the web with a Win2K machine to be a realistic (or safe!) proposition - but I wasn't expecting SSL to be the blocker. (Not least because a few weeks previously I'd installed the latest AmiSSL for AmigaOS, which does support modern TLS! There, of course, Javascript becomes the blocker.)
I looked into this a bit for classic Macs (8MHz 68000), and found that they didn't have the computing power to complete a handshake before the timeout was up. I could be wrong though, and maybe some faster implementation is possible...
It makes sense. Timing is important in crypto as you don't want Eve to have enough time to brute force the secret out of the exchange between Alice and Bob.
We'll need to build new network cards with hardware accelerators.
And be back to the stage where the most powerful computer in the office was a peripheral (back then we had a printer with more memory than all our Macs combined and a flashy AMD 29K CPU)
Unfortunately, many simply don't work for 99.9% of the modern Web due to it requiring TLS 1.3. For example, on Windows 98,there is a myth of some Opera version that had TLS 1.3 support, but I haven't had a chance of finding it. TLS 1.2 is the latest one can get
It is quite ironic that it is not JavaScript, or the modern dynamic Web features that prove most difficult to back port to old operating systems, but SSL.
Of course there is the Web proxy that renders modern Web as an image map accessible even to the oldest computers, but this is "cheating" as you really are using a modern OS to sort of pre-digest content. You need a modern OS constantly running to use your vintage machine just in case you might need to download some file from the Web.