What is the oldest Mac/browser combo that you would browse the web and download old software with?

[Schmoburger]

OK, so I am currently in the process of throwing together a website to be a kind of central resource for unsupported and vintage Mac's, primarily the latter. It is going to, among other things, contain the old support site directories and files as something of another mirror, such that people may access them easily. This is only part of it, as there will be pages with other applicable links, info, articles, etc eventually down the track. In this respect, nothing special.

However part of my objective is to make this page viewable by basically almost any old machine that has an internet connection and some kind of graphical browser. As such I am going in a very very lo-fi and barebones direction... black text all in a universal font, strictly HTML, text hyperlinks, no animations, minimal and small images in basic, early universal formats such as GIF... basically the plan is only to use content that is thin enough and in a format that it is going to almost universally compatible with any browser and hardware that people would have reason to browse it on. You could say it is well and truely function, with form basically not a concern.

My question to the people who would actually use any of this site in this way is, what is the oldest machine, oldest browser, and slowest net connection you are likely to browse this site on if you were to make use of it. I am pretty much trying to gauge exactly how much room I have to play with aesthetics, ie. use of images etc, without alienating or making anybody's ecperience painful in the process... Realistically I am happy to leave the page completely devoid of images and in black on white text if it makes peoples lives easier, but if I can get away with a bit more tart, so be it!

Cheers.

Kieran

 

[galgot]

Oldest I've tried was Macweb on a Classic. But was really slow.

I think it would have problem listing a long list of files/links...

 

[Schmoburger]

Hmmmm yes much and all as I would love to make something that works on an ancient 9" 8Mhz machine, I'd tend to think it might probably be getting to the point of being unrealistic trying to work around those extreme limitations... 9' screen, a peanut for a processor, bugger all RAM and no real way to improve any of these hard and fast limitations. A /30 would be a little better for the task I dare say, and I am building it to be monochrome friendly, but I am thinking that the 16Mhz machines would likely be the lower limit of what is feasibly going to be tolerable to the average user. The novelty value of having a site that's browsable on a Classic or Plus is kind of cool, so I guess working around them for that reason is worthwhile, but I dare say that the old support library section would best be left to a more capable machine and transferred via sneakernet or localtalk rather than a direct download, as I can see it chioking on that gargantuan directory tree.

That being said, some things can be placed in a more easily accessible place if warranted... System 7 updaters for example.

 

[TheWhiteFalcon]

An iBook clamshell (366mhz FW) on 9.2.2 with IE 5 if necessary.

 

[galgot]

Ah sorry , misunderstood your question

Oldest I would use would be a PB1400C on System 7.6.1, with Opera 5 or icab.

 

[Danamania]

I'd use near anything.

Oftentimes, depending what's on the machines to start with, all I'll have is a default install of something ridiculously lightweight (Netscape 2 on an 020 anyone?) and hook it up to the Pro with a webserver running and serving my old mac archives as an apache-only folder listing.

It works just fine, and a long as everything is presented in a tree much like apple's old archives, there's not too much displaying at once. A couple hundred items in a folder works usably. With age-appropriate simplicity in the html and no (or only very basic) scripting, there's no reason it wouldn't serve everything from an '020 up just fine.

FTP is another world of efficiency higher though, and I'm more likely to use it on the slower machines. Any way of doing an anonymous login read-only ftp for the slower ones? Worked for us in the '80s!

 

[sadmanonatrain]

The oldest I use would be my Power Macintosh G3 minitower with Classilla running Mac OS 8.6.

One day I'll try surfing the internet with my IIfx and IIci when I get the equipment sorted.

 

[IPalindromeI]

Cut out the web and use AFP for files and Gopher for content.

 

[bse5150]

Browsing with a 68k machine is too painful.  I might try Classilla on my beige G3, or maybe just stick with TenFourFox on my G4 Mac Mini.

 

[CC_333]

I think some sort of FTP site would be fun. Ony issues are that it's probably not the most secure (it seems any hacker would be interested in antique Mac software, though).

That being said, you could go all out and use a contemporary machine like an 8600 or beige G3 running AppleShare (or whatever Apple's server software was) to minimize the risk of someone compromising the thing since there's virtually nothing to gain by doing so (security by obscurity?)

c

 

[Schmoburger]

I did actually toy with the possibility of a seperate locally run AFP or FTP server on one of my own systems, that said however, it would be more of a cool novelty to be running a server on the worlld wide web off an Old World power-tower than having any particularly persuasive benefit.

In any case running an FTP server in any form is likely, whether it be hosted remotely or under my desk, as even though as stated above it isnt exactly a secure protocol these days, by the same token, there is absolutely nothing to be gained by anybody hacking a server full of 20 year old Mac softwares, no sensitive informations to be squandered, no financial benefits to be reaped and nobody standing to benefit in any way from sabotage, and the benefits as far as universal access and efficient transfer go are enough to really offset the infinitesimal risks of using such a protocol, at least in my opinion.  

 

[uniserver]

I like this idea, let me know of the link when you get it up. I will add the link to my vintage macs, I like Netscape. 2.0.1.

 

[mactjaap]

I would like it if you made a web site you could visit with a really old browser! Like Netscape 2.0.1 or Internet Explorer 4.0 (yes...for Mac).

I would also find it a challenge to make it readable for even older browsers, like Netscape 1.1 or Mosaic.....

I don't use modern Mac's. Most of my machines are running system 7.x ....

 

[raoulduke]

Classilla runs fine on OS 8.6 on my Powermac 7100/66 with 50mb of memory - or I should say ran fine.

 

[Schmoburger]

Cheers for the feedback guys... and yes I will definitely keep everyone posted as I make meaningful progress. I can guarantee it is not going to be at all pretty to look at by standards that we would enforce today, but that is the entire point, to make it simple, functional, easy on the eyes, with no bloat, and without the requirements for complex plugins... basically the idea is that I can jump onto my Color Classic, LC, Performa 200 or SE/30 with System 7 and an ancient mosaic-derived browser, and be able to have a reasonable experience browsing the page, without any data being unviewable or impaired. I know another member had a page up at one point with a similar idea in mind which was I beleive even hosted from within an old 68k Powerbook.

 

[Cory5412]

There's two separate issues with "FTP" -- the first is that credentials are transmitted in the clear. Not really an issue if you're running a read-only anon FTP site anyway. The other is that FTP server programs can sometimes be used to attack other machines on a network or other programs on a machine.

So, FTP itself is fine, so long as you use an FTPd that doesn't have issues like that (AppleShare IP would be a hilarious option) or something really modern from a patched system.

That said -- in the olden days, I did most of my file transfers with Hotline. These days, plain HTML directory listings or FTP would probably be the most useful if somebody was posting a copy of the Apple Older Software Downloads, or whatever that space was called.

In terms of "If you had a System 7 machine and wanted to get stuff on it" -- a good example to look at might be System7Today.com, which is fairly browsable with version 4 browsers. I'll probably work in version 3 browsers too.

 

[raoulduke]

What was the actual conclusion here?  My PM 7100's HD died a few weeks ago so the largest working SCSI drive I currently have is 200 mb.  I have 7.5 running on the PM now, but I could only fit Netscape 1 [which I just happened to have in my downloads folder on my desktop] on a floppy.

Then from Netscape - this is a little ironic - I couldn't properly access sourceforge (shocker), or macintoshgarden [i had this problem on 8.6 also], Max's server, oldapps, etc.  So I couldn't really download a newer browser.  It'd be enormously useful to have a simple server or this is going to be a sort of bootstrap issue.  Obviously I could use a CD [and I have one, I guess I have a file translation issue].  Still, this seems like something relevant to point out given the goal.  If Apple's older software list were still up it'd be irrelevant.

[Maybe this wouldn't be so common a problem.  I just happen to be low on CD-Rs, and I have an ethernet transceiver so wired internet is the easiest way to directly grab files that are always on the internet... usually.]

But I also realized that I didn't totally know what to download.  So what was the conclusion - IE 4/4.5?

 

[Schmoburger]

I think the general consensus is that the most semi-comfortable time you will have on any "normal" internet browsing session is with a version 3 or 4 browser at minimum, but that anything is technically usable depending upon content. That said, basically, eBay and Youtube don't even work particularly well in my 10 year old version of Safari on my G4 tower, but like many other current web pages they make use of a lot of content types and plug-in's that simply did not exist 10 years ago, or 10 years prior to that, or did in only a very infant form.

What I am angling for with the page I am making is basically to have something that will be viewable on the most basic of systems that are still relatively connectable, and capable of using the earliest variants of graphical browsing platforms. This is pretty much acheivable by sticking to basic  legacy protocols and formats, keeping content elements small in size for reasonable load times on bottlenecked old connections, and laying out the page in a way that you can browse from the oldest machinery and still have full functionality (basic though that functionality is by nature).

Unfortunately I am having some issues with connecting to the server to upload the homepage, so unfortunately I am unable to get any usable feedback from people until I get this sorted. I figure once I successfully get a page or two up, I can see what works and what doesnt under real world conditions and go from there.

 

[nglevin]

I tend to use Netscape 2.02 with CERN's first website as its home page on my 33 Mhz Quadra. Most of the time I use it to download old Mac files from various websites, always through HTTP not S and usually by direct linking.

Someone recently showed off the web through 2.01's eyes, in celebration of the browser's 16th anniversary. It is surprisingly not as bad as what you'd see from more recent browsers that support early CSS.

This version of Netscape allows you to load images separate from page content, and it doesn't support CSS at all. So you typically just see naked HTML sort-of-3.2. And even though it supports JavaScript 1.0(!), I typically leave JavaScript disabled because this was before we had fast JS runtimes, and almost nobody apart from a few rescued, old GeoCities sites still have page content coded directly to that standard.

No mandatory old, slow Java runtime, either. Netscape 2 was the last version before Java became standard with Netscape releases.

EDIT: Before I forget, the venerable Netscape Defrost extension seems to address most crash issues I've had with the older Netscapes, versions 2 and 3. Anyone who wishes to browse the web as I have should consider that a must.