27 Year Old Mac Plus Hacked to Browse the Web [Video]

Jeff Keacher has managed to successfully hack a 27 year old Mac Plus to browse the Web.

The Mac Plus features a 8 MHz CPU, 4 MB RAM, 50 MB hard drive, and 512 x 342 pixel black-and-white screen. To accomplish his goals, Keacher needed a web browser, a TCP/IP stack, and some way to connect the computer to his home network.

The web browser was relatively easy for him to find. MacWeb 2.0 was old enough to run on the Plus and new enough to render HTML and speak HTTP.


Getting the computer to hook up to the network was harder. For the hardware, Keacher ended up connecting a Raspberry Pi to his router and using a level shifter and some old adapters he was able to get a serial cable working between the Pi and the Mac. For the software, he was able to get MacTCP to talk to MacPPP, MacPPP to talk to SLiRP, and SLiRP to use the Ethernet connection.

Unfortunately, MacWeb didn't offer support for hostnames, HTTPS, cookies, and CSS. Keacher contacted his friend Tyler about the problem and Tyler was able to whip up a filtering proxy solution using Python, Requests, Flask, and Beautiful Soup.

Although surfing is unbelievable slow, in the end it's actually possible to browse the Web on a 27 year old Mac Plus.

Take a look below...


Read More [via Jay]

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