Gearing Up for Summer

[Scott Baret]

Has anyone thought about their summer projects yet for RC2K9?

I'm thinking about taking up Macromedia Director (I have version 2.0) and using it in conjunction with HyperCard (like Cyan did to create Spelunx) to design a tutorial program for fractions at the elementary level (I'm thinking grades K-6 for the program).

 

[arfink]

Indeed I have. Well, kinda. Mostly I am just finishing the last half of the semester here and hoping that'll be alright first. But I have been thinking about doing more work on my Tandy 102 BBS, and also a second run at a better, smaller scale Neo Geo CMVS. And I need to find something fun to do with my latest retro find, the Tandy 200. Or maybe an endurance challenge on my IIgs would be fun, since I've been doing that already with my "regular" laptop dead the past month.

 

[Bunsen]

Some vague plans. Mucking around with BBC BASIC, Z80 assembly, and parallel port interfacing on the Amstrad NC100 Notepad. Classic casemods, as always. Homebrew Daystar PDS adapter. We'll see what eventuates.

 

[luddite]

I'm hoping to pull off an endurance challenge this year... though work might interfere with that plan. Seems like I have quite a few unfinished projects from previous RetroChallenges, so maybe I'll try to address those.

 

[System7]

Would a B&W G3 be too new to participate?

I find it to be the oldest usable mac that can ping out to the modern interweb.

If not, I can fall back to my q800 and PB540c.

 

[Dog Cow]

I don't know if it qualifies for the contest, but I wouldn't mind using my Apple //e to browse web pages served by my Mac mini. I'll need a super serial card, though first.

Planned layout: Apple //e (SSC) -> Power Mac G3 -> Mac mini

1983 - 1998 - 2008 ... that's a good span, I think.

No Ethernet except for G3 to Mac mini. G3 will be running some sort of bridge, I suppose.

 

[luddite]

Would a B&W G3 be too new to participate?

Sorry, we've decided to cut-off at the 68k / 486 point in computer history. PPCs are verboten ;-)

I find it to be the oldest usable mac that can ping out to the modern interweb.If not, I can fall back to my q800 and PB540c.

Shouldn't have much problem getting either of those online... and they both qualify for the RetroChallenge.

In case anyone's wondering the official rules are here. Other than the entry deadlines, I don't anticipate any changes.

 

[luddite]

Planned layout: Apple //e (SSC) -> Power Mac G3 -> Mac mini

Just to clarify, using newer hardware as a gateway is quite acceptable. In a case like this the challenge of using the IIe to browse web pages is the same whether you connect locally or to an ISP or dial-up shell account.

 

[chris]

Is a PB3400C acceptable? It's the oldest thing I have capable of connecting to the net.

 

[II2II]

After the past few months in a high-tech quagmire, I could use a month of vintage computing. Numerous projects come to mind:

Getting an Amiga 500 on the Internet, first by using it as a terminal on a serial line to a more modern computer. Then via SLIP or PPP.

If I feel very energetic, I'll dig up some old MAKE articles and figure out how to make a serial to ethernet bridge so that I can get vintage computers online without another computer.

Getting my Amiga 2000 working again, then getting it online via a bridgeboard/ethernet combination.

Since I sold and gave away my Apple II gear, dig up an emulator and some old education title to compare what we had back then to what I'm dealing with today.

 

[luddite]

Is a PB3400C acceptable? It's the oldest thing I have capable of connecting to the net.

Well, now... let's clarify a few more points:

First off, you don't have to get anything online to participate in the RetroChallenge... be creative, and (most importantly) be prepared to challenge yourself.

Secondly, any computer with a serial port can get online one way or another...

Thirdly, see my second last post

 

[Bunsen]

we've decided to cut-off at the 68k / 486 point

Shouldn't the title of this thread be "Gearing Down for Summer"? :lol:

4. Where appropriate, replica hardware and emulators may be used.

So that would allow things like the Playpower NES clone 6502 system mentioned elsewhere?

 

[luddite]

So that would allow things like the Playpower NES clone 6502 system mentioned elsewhere?

Yes... though if you're at all concerned about competing for the one of the (ahem!) lucrative prize packages, I think you'd be better off with a real retro system.

 

[arfink]

Lucrative... hmph!

As a part of my gearing down for this summer project I will be brushing up on my HTML and making my own web page using only my old computers. If I can get some documentation (not likely on the SDF) I might even contemplate a Gopher blog. Which I believe are known as phlogs. Gee, I wonder why that would be...

If they ever finish up the freeware release of ProTerm for Apple II then I would be able to do more (like use GS apps to make pictures and put those online, and other cool things) but they seem to keep getting stalled over at the Lost Classics repository. They said we'd have it weeks ago, and still nothing.

 

[gavo]

Has anyone thought about their summer projects yet for RC2K9?

Seems like endurance might be the in thing this time round. Must be something in the water because I was thinking that I might try to do all of my recreational computing (media centre PC doesnt count right) on my old 128k Mac, connected to the interweb via my PC and Retro-net.org for the challenge.

Should bring back some (painful) memories

 

[II2II]

@arfink:

Any particular reason why you need ProTerm on the Apple II?

@gavo:

Painful? You ain't seen nutin'.

 

[coius]

Well, if anyone has visited my PowerBook site, you might notice that my powerbook 540c is down. I need to get it back up, but that will take a while. The laptop keeps randomly shutting down, so the site is hosted on my Dell server right now (Nicknamed "Magi")

 

[mactjaap]

I can't wait for summer to enter the Retro Challenge so…I started now… No to be honnest..in the last weeks I was working on a project which involved an old web server. I’m trying to get a Macintosh Plus connected to the Internet and on top of that running a web server on it.

There are a lot off challenges. First of all, a Macintosh Plus doesn’t have an Ethernet card on board… second it has no hard disk and third it is only capable running an old version of the Mac OS, System 6.0.8.

I can now say that I was able to do it and get a webserver running. I was inspired and helped by an old page I saved. You can have a look at my copy of it on:

http://webservermuseum.org/aurejac.html

I also download in 2001 his two images of 800K floppy disks and saw that he used a minimal system in combination with a small finder substitute. The also had a SCSI to Ethernet converter to get the Macintosh Plus online.

The approach I used was a little bit different. I build also a small system disk ( 7.0.1) with MacTCP and a substitude Finder (8K) on it and used my Quadra 800 as a Localtalk / TCP IP bridge with IPNetroute running on it. This makes it possible to combine a Ethernet and Localtalk network with TCP/IP.

On a separate external 800K floppy disk I use httpd4Mac as web server. This program from 1994/1995 is the oldest web server I could find which works without problems. It has problems with understanding modern browsers so it will answer with a 200 OK response but give a 400 error page to them. Fortunately this is 400 response page is hard coded in the application, so with the help of ResEdit I changed the content of this page to a more nice (but simple) response. Date information is totally wrong. If you use Lynx or an old browser you will see the real home page on the floppy disk. This is also a one liner, because the server is really slooooow!

I have it now online only for two days and it is running fine! I will work on it for the coming weeks and try to adjust and tweek it. I will also try to provide more information, disk images files, etc. You can see it running at. I not prommising how long it will be online, but surely this weekend!

http://macplus.webservermuseum.org/

I’m inspired by this project to collect more information about the history of web servers so i started a small web site: http://www.webservermuseum.org

On this site I will post regularly about this subject. This article is also available at this site.

 

[luddite]

Nice job! Did you try MacHTTP as server software?