Old Mac, Modern Internet

[mactjaap]

Haha. The positive side is that we have now high expectations of your pictures!

 

[jhorvath911]

It's funny you mention it, I had actually started working a while back on a python project to mock the OSCAR protocol used by AOL instant messenger. The goal being that you could write another component that links to, say, facebook chat, and then delivers buddy lists, IMs, etc. to the AIM client as if it were to an AIM account. I had gotten as far as successfully mocking an login, and fetching some statistics. I then gave up on it. It's actually not horribly onerous, but for one guy with very little time on his hands, it got to be too much.

When I get home I will look on my personal laptop and find out what git repo I was committing to, if anyone is interested.

I know I would be interested in something like that. It would give an old machine on my desk a use again. You should start a new topic about it and maybe there will be more interest.

 

[Machead]

I've managed to build it despite all the errors I got.  I now have it running, but I can only get the first four messages I ever received (August 2009).  My mailbox has over ten thousand messages in it.  My email client is Eudora Light 3.1.

 

[VMSZealot]

Okay, so there are a few things to do first (not least letting me know what system you built on, and what errors you saw. Email them to me at the 45RPM Software support address.) There shouldn't be any build errors or warnings.

Next, look in the mail folder that you configured in your configuration file. How many emails are there? If there are only four emails there then further thought / investigation is required into how your email is being retrieved.

If that mail folder is full(er) then it may be that Eudora Lite is using the POP server in a way that I haven't fully implemented. My focus has been on Claris Emailer - so I've only implemented the functionality (so far) that Emailer users. Check the console for the messages being sent to the POP server - and send me that list as well so I can implement anything else that I've missed.

Right now, retrieval works well for me - and I've made inroads on reformatting email for classic compatibility (albeit that the current solution is a bit hacky). SMTP does not work yet though. Watch this space.

 

[flecom]

With all the talk that's going on lately with old macs and internet this seems like an appropriate place to share what I think would be really cool. I wish that I could use for instance the old AOL software on one of my 68k macs but have current content delivered to the application. It would be a single interface to access email, get information from the web, and we already know the Client software runs on our machines.

So basically it would be setting up a server to allow connection from old mac running aol client and deliver current content. And the whole point that it would be a stripped down tool that's keeping you from having to deal with the complexities of the internet.

man that would be awesome, I was watching the CNN documentary about the 90s and was thinking to myself, man, nobody will ever again know what it was like to dial-in to prodigy and see all the menus and stuff, AOL's full client, etc... would be great if someone could emulate that...

the modern internet is neat (especially any kind of messaging/email gateways) but it would be cool to have something era correct running on these machines if we want to show what it was like back then...

an OSCAR (AIM) to facebook gateway would be amazing for example

 

[Scott Squires]

Someone is doing that, but with gopher instead of AOL:

https://68kmla.org/forums/index.php?/topic/30788-gopherserver/

 

[VMSZealot]

Okay. So there's a new version up on GitHub which does more to reformat email so that it displays correctly with classic Mac email clients. More work needs to be done to strip extended Unicode (emoji), and (for some reason) some messages are losing their subjects. All this is fixable.

SMTP is slightly more working - it can send, and send to the correct recipient, but what it sends is incomplete / nonsense. I suspect that I need to reformat the classic email to be compatible with modern SMTP servers. More investigation required.

Progress has also been made on displaying vintage internet correctly using classic web browsers (I think)…

Watch this space.

 

[mraroid]

All I could ever want is to read and send gmail on my LC 575 Color Classic under 6.7 or 8.1.

I used Eudora all throught the 1990s and it would be fun to use it again, but I am not picky.  I can use Claris Emailer.

I am watching this space.  Do you have a pay-pay donate button?

I need to down load this package?

https://github.com/PascalHarris/NetGateway

mraroid

 

[CC_333]

This reminds me of my first email experience, which happened on a PowerBook G3 running Mac OS 8.6. I was using Outlook Express... 4.5? Might've been 5.something.

This happened in 2004, when one still could. I'm not sure when everything broke (i.e., when all the security algorithms got updated), but I'd imagine it happened after 2010, because that was the last time I remember it kinda-sorta working under Classic.

It would be neat if someone can get at least email working again. Classilla would be a good place to start. It's PPC only, but it serves as a good blueprint for something 68k-based, and it has an email client built in that stands a chance of working with some adjustments.

c

 

[mraroid]

More bad news for 68K web surfing?

https://blog.malwarebytes.com/101/2017/09/google-reminds-website-owners-to-move-to-https-before-october-deadline/?utm_source=double-opt-in&utm_medium=email-internal-b2c&utm_campaign=EM-B2C-2017-September-newsletter-issue1&utm_content=Google-Http

mraroid

 

[TheWhiteFalcon]

Firefox has been doing this for months. It’s a good move on their part; there’s no reason to leave things vulnerable for a fraction of a percent of users.

 

[IPalindromeI]

Seriously people; setting up stunnel or an HTTPS stripping/converting proxy or just using big boy machines to do the net work for you is the future. (Or living in some kind of VPN/LAN full of retro stuff.)

 

[VMSZealot]

Seriously people; setting up stunnel or an HTTPS stripping/converting proxy or just using big boy machines to do the net work for you is the future. (Or living in some kind of VPN/LAN full of retro stuff.)

Excellent.  Detailed instructions please? I couldn't get it to work at stripping / converting - but I'd love to know how to.

 

[mraroid]

I don't need web surfing support.  I like surfing older 68K web sites:

http://www.macfixer.com/vintage-software/

But reading and writting email on my color classic would make it much more usefull.  So any details on how to do that would be appreciated.  I don't have a raspberry pi here in ecuador, but I have a extra windows box I could use as a gateway.  I also would like any instructions...

mraroid 

 

[jack]

I can send and recieve email on my macs using ZTerm and a serial line to my desktop computer running mutt... yes, it's cheating.

Many of the older mac email clients lack security features like SMTP authenticaion, SSL, and (the deal breaker for me) PGP. So I'm OK with cheating.

 

[mraroid]

so Jack - you run ZTerm on your Mac?  Is this a 68K Mac? Is Mutt a windows ap or a apple app?

I don't think I have a desktop computer old enought to have a serial port.  But I will dig an old one out and look.

Thanks for the tips.

mraroid

 

[jack]

so Jack - you run ZTerm on your Mac?  Is this a 68K Mac?

Yep, you can run ZTerm on both 68k and PPC.

Is Mutt a windows ap or a apple app?

I run Mutt on Linux, but I'm fairly certain it will run on Mac OS X as well. No idea on Windows...

I don't think I have a desktop computer old enought to have a serial port.  But I will dig an old one out and look.

USB serial ports do wonders...

 

[zenwheel]

I got my Quadra 800 up and running again and tried to use the web, saw barely anything worked and then found this thread.  Determined, I threw together this script to act as a proxy enough to get Netscape 1.0N to show (most of) a few web pages.  You set it as an HTTP Proxy and access the HTTP version of a website, then the proxy accesses the website (obeying any 30x redirect to a secure version, etc) and does some filtering including converting PNG and SVG to GIFs on the fly and stripping SCRIPT and STYLE tags.  My goal was to get it running on a Raspberry Pi and the README shows how to get it running on one... if you know anything about ruby and gems, you shouldn't have too much trouble getting it rolling on other platforms.  PRs welcome if anyone beats me to trying it with other browsers and can help improve it!

https://github.com/zenwheel/legacyproxy

 

[beachycove]

Why not use a text-only browser: http://lowendmac.com/myturn/03/0613.html ?

 

[mactjaap]

Nice Zenwheel! Will give it a try!