When the Macintosh Plus was released 27 years ago, it was the most powerful Mac on the market. It even contained a SCSI port, which opened the door to the Macintosh getting a modem. Eventually, there were even internet browsers released for the Macintosh Plus.
That got Jeff Keacher over at the Daily Dot thinking. What would it be like to plug a 1976 Macintosh Plus into the modern web? Surprise surprise — it was absolute torture.
Pointing out that his current desktop PC is something like 200,0000 times faster than the Macintosh Plus, Keacher lays out how he ended up hooking his vintage Macintosh up to the modern internet, using a combination of the Macintosh OS web browser MacWeb, a Raspberry Pi, and some custom software to strip out a host of errors.
After a long time banging his head against the wall, this is what Keacher ended up with:
So how’d it work?
Data loaded, pages rendered, and links were clickable. Even forms sort of worked.
Did I mention it was slow? It was slow. Soooo sloooow. Slow slow slow. Like, minutes to read and render a page slow.
Whatever. The goal was simply to introduce the Mac to the Web.
The meet-and-greet was successful.
We’ve come a long way since 1987, baby. If you’ve got a vintage Macintosh Plus lying around, and want to hook it up to the Internet, you can follow the instructions at the link below. Just don’t expect to torrent on it.
Source: Kernel Mag
