Getting my 6500/300 Power Macintosh on the Internet

[GerrySch]

As I mentioned last week, I purchased a PowerMac 6500/300 at VCF and, among other things, am working on getting it on line. I bought a Realtek RTL8139D PCI networking card for $15.00 and it's arrived. It's now installed and I found this on the Macintosh Repository "The Macintosh Repository website is a good resource for older Mac drivers, including those for the RTL8139 series. Specifically, you can search for "Realtek Ethernet PCI Card Drivers [RTL8100B(L)/RTL8100C(L)/RTL8101L/RTL8139C(L) RTL8139C(L)+/RTL8139D(L)/RTL8100(L) RTL8130/RTL8139B(L)]". "

Downloaded and installed said driver and my new PowerMac is online. and Bob's your uncle. I ended up using a 1.44 MB floppy drive to sneakernet the driver from my Win11 laptop to the PowerMac. Worked like a charm. But, (there's always a but) I can't reach anything on-line due to the lack of "https://" encryption support. Given that I'm running MacOS9.1, is there a browser setup to work with encryption? I'm presently using www.frogfind.com to get around the issue (minus pictures) and I can read the internet on my S/E30, Apple IIGSes and LC470 this way. But given the age of this Mac, is there a browser that will run under 9.1 and support encryption?

Also, as a side note, OS 9.1, Internet Explorer and Netscape are MEMORY HOGS! Good thing I upped my RAM to from 64 to 132 MBs as those three Apps use 83MBs of RAM according to 'About this Computer'.

All I can say is WOW!

Thank you all for your time,
Gerry

 

[Forrest]

Since you upgraded the memory, you might want to try the Classilla browser at https://www.macintoshrepository.org/1770-classilla

 

[nathall]

I’ll repost what I posted in your other thread:

”I’m only aware of Classilla 9.3.4, which can do modern https (TLS) stuff if you set up Crypto Ancienne to handle the encryption. I have it set up on my 8500 where I can run it in the background and use Classilla to browse. Note that only version 9.3.4 supports this.“

 

[GerrySch]

Thanks for that info. I'll look into it.

 

[Burgertrench]

You're not going to get HTTPS to work on a mac of that vintage; the processing power required to handle the encryption is simply too high, and there is no browser that would facilitate it. But, you can use a web rendering proxy which runs on another server, which will transcode HTTPS pages to HTTP for your vintage machines. There are a number of different proxies and techniques that can be used, you'll find them here and on tinker different forums.