Connecting an old computer to the modern Web is a recurring experiment in the world of computing: take an old machine, update its software as much as possible, apply a serious batch of hacks, and plug it in. Jeff Keacher took that adventure to the extreme by connecting a Macintosh Plus from 1986. The project required external hardware and a Raspberry Pi, but the final result was definitely worth it.
There is immense pleasure in restoring something and keeping it running even in these days polluted by planned obsolescence and waste. It doesn't even have to be something related to computers or electronics. Furniture, clothing, a tool, kitchen utensils... anything counts. Many times we make mistakes, and what we try to improve ends up worse than before, but even that loss can become knowledge that will be very useful next time. In the case of computers, we still have a good availability of old drivers, previous versions, and complete service manuals. But the most interesting part arises when we try to reconcile those old systems with the current Web. Flash, CSS, multimedia content, and even the HTTPS protocol are complete strangers to 1980s computers. Jeff Keacher was a privileged witness to that generational gap when he decided to browse the Web with his modified 1986 Macintosh Plus.
The first step was a bit of maintenance for the Mac itself. After having been stored for more than ten years, one of the capacitors in the hard drive's power supply demanded its permanent removal. Once that capacitor was replaced, Keacher began the search for compatible software. The combination of MacWeb 2.0 and MacTCP turned out to be more solid than expected under System 7, but the great challenge was establishing a physical connection between the Mac and the router. That's when the Raspberry Pi appears. Using a serial cable (or "serial," as you prefer), two adapters, a level shifter, and the MacWeb-MacTCP-MacPPP-SLiRP combo, the Raspberry Pi functioned as a kind of fake modem. Getting all that software onto the Mac Plus required an obscure file transfer via ZMODEM (that's really old), using the Microphone terminal emulator already installed on the Mac.
The last piece of the puzzle came with the help of a friend of Keacher's, Tyler Hicks-Wright, who developed Macproxy, a script that extracts all the elements that MacWeb can't interpret. That's how you get a very special text version of the Web, viewed through a 29-year-old computer. The experiment was a success... as long as you have patience. The Mac Plus has an 8 MHz processor, and input/output operations on the serial port devour its cycles, so loading each site takes about six minutes, in the best case. After having known the torture of waiting ten minutes to download a megabyte (2 kilobytes per second with phone modems, we were gods!), those six minutes don't sound so bad.
