Portare internet su un Macintosh Plus

Jeff Keacher è riuscito ad aggiornare un Macintosh Plus del 1986 per navigare sul web. Un'esperienza lenta ed emozionante.

Reviving an old computer is like restoring a classic car: There's a thrill from bringing the ancient into the modern world. So it was with my first "real" computer, my Mac Plus, when I decided to bring it forward three decades and introduce it to the modern Web.

It's a lowly machine, my Mac. The specs pale in comparison to even my Kindle: 8 MHz CPU, 4 MB RAM, 50 MB hard drive, and 512 x 384 pixel black-and-white screen. My current desktop PC is on the order of 200,000 times faster--not even including the GPU. Still, that Mac Plus was where I cut my computing teeth as a child. It introduced me to C, hard drives, modems, and the Internet.

Yes, in a certain sense, my Mac has already been on the Internet, first via BBSes and later via Lynx through a dial-up shell sessions. (There's nothing quite like erotic literature at 2400 bps when you're 13 years old.) What it never did was run a TCP/IP stack of its own. It was always just a dumb terminal on the 'net, never a full-fledged member.