Can you surf the net running OS 7.1?

[habibrobert]

Hello,

I am trying to access the internet with my LC for the first time, but I have no idea how to go about it. Can you surf the net with OS 7.1? If so, do you need to install a driver for the farallon ethernet card, or does the system detect it automatically? Do I also need install a web browser, or is it preinstalled? My last question is, what is the oldest OS that you can use to surf the internet?

Sorry for all the questions, tried googling this, but did seem to find the answers to my questions.

Thanks!

 

[Mk.558]

http://www.applefool.com/se30

Third major revision underway, should be a lot clearer and concise.

1) Surf the web with 7.1: Absolutely.

2) Ethernet card driver: Of course you'll have to install it.

3) Web browser: It will have to be install it manually. NCSA Mosaic, MacLynx, iCab 2.9.9 with Thread Manager and I think Drag & Drop is required, and probably Scriptable Finder (7.1.3). I do have a backup version of iCab that was supposed to run on System 7 without those extensions -- either way, 7.1 with extensions can bring it close to 7.5 without the drag of 7.5.

4) Oldest: Humm not something I can answer directly, but this page can. Either way, System 6 is the oldest "independent" that can run off an Ethernet network, MacTCP, and MacWWW, which has some rather sour reports. I've never used it, but I will eventually to see what it's like. Expect lots of bombs.

 

[Anonymous Freak]

And "oldest" can have many definitions. A NeXT running WorldWideWeb would probably be the "oldest", since it was the first web browser - but it would be pretty unusable now.

Same goes with any Mac System 6 compatible browser.

You can run Lynx on an MS-DOS system on a 386 or higher.

An Apple II with Ethernet card can run Contiki to browse the web.

 

[James1095]

In theory you can surf the net, a friend and I recently did this on my IIci after getting ethernet working. The problem is that most modern websites use java, flash, and other scripting languages that are not supported by old browsers. Even having a bunch of large (by late 90s standards) photos will suck up memory and slow things to a crawl. You can find a few old style websites out there though, or browse the internet archive. Unless you have a fast '040 machine it will be painfully slow though.

It's one of those things you might do just because it can be done, but it's certainly not the most enjoyable experience you can have on a vintage machine.

 

[Gorgonops]

You can run Lynx on an MS-DOS system on a 386 or higher.

Over 15 years ago I'd occasionally use Net-Tamer:

http://www.nettamer.net/tamer.html

on a Toshiba T-1100 for semi-real things. (Well, okay, connecting to MUDs, a shell account, and the local library's online catalog with the telnet module. Back then you could also still get away with reading news sites on a browser that primitive. These days you're pretty lucky if something is "lynx-friendly" in the slightest.) PPP over a 1200 baud modem in a 8088 floppy-only XT clone works surprisingly well, in that it works at all. So *in theory* at least with just software you can do full-fledged dialup on hardware 30+ years old. (Yes, a T-1100 dates from 1985, but add a 1982-debut Hayes Smartmodem 1200 to an IBM 5150 and you'll have the same capabilities.)

There are some experimental TCP/IP stacks for CP/M floating around as well if you *really* want to get silly. And if we're not drawing the line at microcomputers some of the UNIX versions for the PDP-11 supported TCP/IP, as did TOPS-20 for the PDP-10/DECSYSTEM-20; certainly in principle you could "surf the web" on one of those, though you might have to write your own software to do it meaningfully.

Finally of course there's the "use an ancient computer as a dumb terminal connecting through something smarter" category, which opens the field to anything with a serial port, but I'm drawing the line and calling that cheating. (As much fun as it might be to "surf the web" on an ASR-33 teletypewriter you've clearly gone overboard at that point.)

 

[Anonymous Freak]

Back in 2003-2004 timeframe, I gave a (*VERY*) poor family friend a Quadra 700 with 14" screen and external 33.6 modem to use for internet access. At the time, it was my best "available to give away" computer. I know he was still actively using it in 2008. Don't know about later than that. (Lost touch after that.)

 

[Bunsen]

Net-Tamer:
http://www.nettamer.net/tamer.html

Oooh, and there's a 286 version. Neat. Maybe my Compaq Portable III has a use after all

There's also loband, which is platform independent and may help once an older Mac is set up for internet.

 

[Gorgonops]

I'm vaguely curious how much Net-Tamer has changed in the ensuing decade(point-five). It's been a while since I had a PPP dialup account so I'd have to go through some effort to make use of it myself.

(There are also TCP/IP packet drivers for DOS that work with PPP, SLIP, and Ethernet, and several Internet programs to use them, but even 15 years ago they weren't of much interest to me because a lot of them really need a 386 or better to be practical and if I had that much power at my disposal I'd run something other than DOS. If you have a 286 with an EEMS/EMS 4.0 memory card and an appropriate memory manager you *might* be able to make use of some of them. On a machine without DOS UMB support loading the TCP/IP stack usually consumes so much base memory you're kind of SOL running anything on top of it. I *think* some Compaq 286 machines have chipset support to emulate EEMS with the right driver, but don't quote me on that.)

 

[Bunsen]

Hmm, wonder if there's an x86 port of Contiki.

 

[Gorgonops]

Re: Contiki, there was an x86 port, but the current version doesn't list it as a supported architecture in the current tree. If you can speak German there's a lead on it here:

http://hitmen.c02.at/html/tools_contiki.html

Note that the focus of the Contiki project has changed *a lot* since the days when people were all excited about using it to get their Commodore 64s or Apple IIs "online". Essentially all the work now is concentrated on using the Contiki kernel as a real-time embedded OS on microcontrollers, with essentially no mention of the cute semi-windowing UI the 1.x tree started with. As a "personal computer" OS at this point it's probably something of a dead end.

 

[James1095]

The biggest problem is still the sites themselves. It isn't too terribly difficult to get a vintage computer talking to the internet, but my experience has been that very few websites will properly render on an ancient browser and this becomes more and more common all the time.

Text based stuff though ought to be fine. My friend has been running IRC on some ancient computers.

 

[habibrobert]

Yes, I imagine it would be hard to get modern websites to display correctly on an older computer. The main reason why I want to connect a mac to the internet is so I can download various OS and enablers and create bootable installation disks that way. I thought that might be one alternative than using a modern mac to create bootable disks. Maybe I would run into less trouble with compatibility issues?

 

[Mk.558]

Using a local ethernet network is a more sagacious plan because downloading on these old machines is slow. I had my former SE/30 hooked up directly to a 10Mbps Charter cable connection, where I once peaked at 1.9MB/sec downloading an update (iOS) from Apple on my mini. The SE/30 peaked at 66KB/sec and no more.

I just put the Duo 2300cTB on the web the other day, and again, 66KB/sec max, but it fluctuates between 50-60KB/sec average. I thought about all kinds of ways to measure the upload but the limitations of iCab make it such that it's just good enough to load the page, but can't do any "advanced" stuff like uploading to the web.

Practically, it's a wee bit faster than 56K was, but not by much. Then there's the problem of decompressing all the archives, which on these machines (especially LCs with their crippled status) is slow.

Boot disks can be created in mini vMac or BII. Mini vMac has an neat speed control feature which can speed up boring operations like rebuilding the desktop to an unthinkable speed compared to a old Mac. The only time that a genuine old Mac is a necessity is creating 400K MFS disk images.

 

[uniserver]

56k (Bits) modem only got between 5-6K(bites) 66kb(bites) through your network is acutely pretty reasonable.

Back in the day ISDN, X2 56K B Channels or X2 64K B Channels, and the luxury of instant connect

was a real treat @ 12 to 18Kb(bites) of raw speed.

I'm not 100% sure, I think the Mac Con Ethernet adaptor in my IIsi was getting 120kb 130kb

that might have been though a FTP transfer from my server in my local network though.

Crap now i am going to have to lug it out.....

 

[volvo242gt]

Yes it can be done. Just have to go to sites that are still HTML 1.0/2.0 compliant. Not very many out there, but there are some.



Granted, I'm running 7.5.5 on my IIci, but I did this last fall. Netscape 2.0, viewing www.jagshouse.com. Connected to the internet via an Asanté MC3-NB, Linksys WRT54GL router, and DSL modem. For a 25MHz '030 machine, it was pretty snappy. But, nowhere near as quick as my G4, of course.

-J

 

[Mk.558]

Very simple webpages like this one are ideal, or direct download links.

LAN will be faster than WAN (internet). Case in point: SE/30, .52Mbps max down on a WAN, 1.6Mbps down and 2.1Mbps up on a local AFP transfer.

iCab is slow and bloated on a 68K, but a fast '040 or better, 603e helps a bit. Pages loaded about twice as fast as the former SE/30 on the 2300cTB (google on SE/30: about 20 seconds, 2300cTB: a bit less than 10)