For some time now, Apple has developed a reputation for manufacturing computers and phones that are not particularly repairable or upgradable. While this reputation is somewhat deserved, especially in recent years, it seems less true for their older machines. With the second and perhaps most influential computer, the Apple II, being so upgradable that the machine had a production run of nearly two decades. Similarly, the Macintosh Plus of 1986 was surprisingly upgradable and repairable and [Hunter] demonstrates its capabilities by bringing one onto the modern Internet, albeit with a few tricks to adapt the old hardware and software to the modern era.
The Mac Plus was salvaged from a thrift store, and the first issue to solve was that it had some rotten capacitors that had to be replaced before the computer could be reliably powered on at all. [Hunter] then got to work bringing this computer online, with the only major hardware modification being a BlueSCSI hard drive emulator which allows using an SD card instead of an original hard disk. It can also emulate an original Macintosh Ethernet card, allowing it to fairly easily get online.
The original operating system and browser don’t support modern protocols such as HTTPS or scripting languages like Javascript or CSS, so a tool called MacProxy was used to bridge this gap. It serves simplified HTML from the Internet to the Mac Plus, but [Hunter] wanted it to work even better, adding modular domain-specific handling to allow the computer to more easily access sites like Reddit, YouTube, and even Hackaday, although he does call us out a bit for not maintaining our retro page perhaps as well as it ought to be.
[Hunter] has also built an extension to use the Wayback Machine to serve websites to the Mac from a specific date in the past, which really enhances the retro feel of using a computer like this to access the Internet. Of course, if you don’t have original Macintosh hardware but still want to have the same experience of the early Internet or retro hardware this replica Mac will get you there too.
An elegant computer from a more civilized age
+1
The Lisa was neat, too.
A real workstation, initially required for Mac development.
By use of MacWorks/MacWorks XL it could boot into an environment being equivalent to ~System 2/3/4 and run Mac applications.
Example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lx5k5Z0PH58
Hokey operating systems and ancient hardware are no match for a good blaster at your side.
What I want to know is, is there any way I can make the whole internet look like this, but on a modern browser on modern hardware? So tired of crappy bloaty web experiences, and I imagine enough other people are similarly tired of it that solutions have been created. Anyone know of browser extensions or proxy servers that do this? I’m thinking like reader mode, but for the whole web, and with at least a bit of the designers’ original CSS.
A good adblocker with custom filter lists and disabling javascript goes a long way. There’s also pihole which can do DNS based filtering but I haven’t tried it