• Please review our updated Terms and Rules here

Completed the ridiculous: Macintosh 128 "on the Internet".

A

Anonymous Freak

Veteran Member
Joined
Oct 9, 2007
Messages
762
Location
Cascadia
(A copy and paste from my post on the 68kMLA, plus a picture from later in that thread: )

Alright. The definition may be stretching it, but I just successfully got my M0001 to browse to the 68kmla!

Then I discovered that the 128's keyboard, with it's missing arrow keys, Control key, and Escape key, is useless as a serial terminal.

But, here it is! A picture of my Macintosh 128, serial terminaled into my Linux box via MacTerminal 1.1, running elinks, browsed to the 68kmla:

M0001MLA.jpg


It was immediately after taking this picture that I realized I had no way to navigate in ELinks. (ELinks is a port of the "Lynx" text-mode web browser.)

I was able to do a bit of command-line work on it, though.

Ironically, I think the Apple IIc that sits next to my 128 would be a much more useful serial terminal. Solely because it has arrow keys and a Control key.

And, just to top off the ironic-meter: the Linux box? It's a quad-socket, dual-core-per-socket, Itanium system, with 16 GB of RAM. This monstrosity has the same L1 cache as the Macintosh has system RAM, more L2 cache than both floppy drives' capacity combined, and more L3 cache per CPU than all storage on the Mac put together, including the HD20! Just the on-CPU caches combined is more than 100 MB of RAM.

Update: Thanks to a tip from someone on the 68kMLA thread, I now have arrow-access. I hadn't bothered putting the numeric keypad on because of the space constraints (in my pic, you can see how it's sitting on the //c next to it,) but now it'll sit there


(click for full size -- Yes, that's the Itanium server it's sitting on top of. No, I don't leave it running for long with that lack of overhead clearance causing no convective cooling.)
 
Very nice! I use my Classic II with SSH and IRC, but the Classic II has quite a bit more power than a 128k!
 
Well done! I am very impressed... and a little annoyed that you got an older computer on the internet than mine.

(I posted this using a 1987 Amiga 500.)


Edit: See my A500 browsing the internet here.
 
Last edited:
Originally my plan was to have the Apple //c next to it act as a serial terminal, but I was having issues getting terminal software loaded onto an Apple II 5.25" disk. I had a bootable MacTerminal disk, so when the 128 arrived, I knew I had to try it. (It's older than the //c by a couple months, anyway.)

I'd wager that your Amiga 500 might be more useful on the' net, though. (Amiga Mosaic exists, while there are no web browsers even theoretically possible to run on a Mac earlier than the Plus.)
 
Apple actually advertised IBM 3278 terminal emulation in their original Mac brochure. I don't know how they handled the lack of necessary control and function keys, though.
 
Now try coming here on that 128k! (with how much CPU the new forum software uses on my G3 i bet the 68k would explode)
 
I hate to throw cold water on this, but it's just running a terminal emulator, right? If that is the case, a C64 can do this too ...
 
linuxlove said:
Now try coming here on that 128k! (with how much CPU the new forum software uses on my G3 i bet the 68k would explode)
Click to expand...

Okay. Here you are. This forum works just fine in ELinks. Any website that is usable in Lynx should be usable this way.

Yes, it was more the silliness of it than the actual technical accomplishment. Yes, this "feat" could be accomplished just fine on a Commodore 64, Apple II, or any other early "PC" that has a keyboard, display, serial port, and some form of serial terminal software. Heck, and old 'keyboard and paper printer' serial terminal would work, if you found a way to make ELinks be linear.

For comparison, my other bit of recent silliness is to run X apps remotely over SSH, so that I'm running massive CPU-crunching apps on my eight-core Itanium, but having them display on my Atom netbook.

I just like the incongrunce of doing something on a piece of hardware that seems inappropriate. (It seemed incongruently funny connecting the Macintosh to the Itanium; for a more age-appropriate 'silliness', I'll probably connect an SE/30 running NetBSD to the 'net via Ethernet, then do the serial terminal from one compact Mac to another.)


edit: If it wasn't clear, this post was originally submitted via ELinks.

If I was a programmer, I likely would make a silly attempt to program a serial PPP client, TCP/IP stack, and Lynx-style text browser in 200 KB of storage and 128 KB of RAM. But since I'm not a programmer, the serial terminal trick is as close as I can get to an "Internet connected Macintosh 128K".
 
I have my SE/30 connected to the internet regularly, but this is much more impressive. I'd been looking at getting the necessary adapters to connect my Plus to the 'web, but something in me told me it just wasn't worth the effort, having the SE/30 and all.

That's very unlike me - I do like silliness involving old computers, usually. Now I'm slightly more motivated. Thanks!

Also, I'm jealous of your Itanium system.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top