27-year-old Mac Plus connected to the internet

Most of us have old tech gadgets lying around gathering dust, but one engineer has decided to put his to good use.Jeff Keacher from Colorado successfully managed to wire up a 27-year-old Mac Plus - an early version of the Apple Mac computer - to the web using a Raspberry Pi and proxy server.This is particularly impressive because the computer was built in 1986 - five years before the first web servers were switched on and the world wide web officially launched - and it is said to be '200,000 times slower' than modern-day desktop PCs.This means it didn’t have a web browser, couldn’t read web addresses and didn’t even have an Ethernet port in order to connect it to Keacher’s router. The full process of how Keacher managed to connect his now antique hardware is available on his blog.He began by installing a version of MacWeb 2.0 - an early version of the Mac web browser that runs on the Mac System 7 operating system.  To connect the computer to the router, without an Ethernet port, Keacher used a series of old adapters to to connect a Raspberry Pi to the Mac Plus. He then connected the Pi to the router.MacWeb 2.0 is not capable of reading web addresses and serving links and pages in the same way as modern-day browsers because it doesn’t recognise computer languages such as javascript or CSS.Instead, Keacher recruited a friend to write a proxy program that took the URL of websites, removed all modern-day computer language, cookies and images and turned the sites into basic text versions.Keacher was then able to read Wikipedia pages and access Hacker News through the retro browser.On his blog, Keacher explained: ‘Yes, in a certain sense, my Mac has already been on the internet through dial-up shell sessions.‘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.’‘Sure, it was slow as hell, but it worked! Data loaded, pages rendered, and links were clickable. Even forms sort of worked.’Keacher has a Master of Science Degree in Management Science and Engineering from Stanford University. he also holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering from Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology.(dailymail.co.uk)ANN.Az