Wow. I don’t usually like to make “everything is worse now” comments, but, I really wonder how dwindling the pool of sites/services are that let you collect such simple data that it can be viewed in such a constrained environment and still have nearly it’s full user experience. Using any part of the modern internet now feels like it’s in this new world untouchable by yesterday’s technology, and seeing modern Wikipedia in such an old OS kinda shook me. Stuff like this makes me wish Gopher managed to gain traction.
I really appreciate jcs’ work tinkering with such an unsupported platform, it warms my heart. I always love seeing that stuff, from the communities around OS/2 to PalmOS, and especially FreeDOS (I actually own a physical copy of the FreeDOS Kernel book by the late Pat Villani), to be honest, I find it kind of a shame that old Mac OS/System software doesn’t have the same community MS-DOS does. We need to keep this old technology alive, before our technology becomes a new Antikythera mechanism for future generations (kind of an exaggeration, but there are a lot of people who are genuinely curious/confused about the evolution of computers).
As someone who hasn’t really used DOS in modern times (outside of flashing her graphics card BIOS), I would have assumed classic Mac OS has a more vibrant community.
That said, the world of DOS is probably a little more accessible today than retro Macs, considering PCs still boot in real mode when Apple’s switched CPU architectures twice over since then.
I have no knowledge about the DOS community, but I do pay attention to the vintage Mac community on occasion.
There are at least two quite active communities for vintage Macs with a moderate amount of new software being written and a kind of surprising amount of new hardware.
They are: https://68kmla.org/ and https://tinkerdifferent.com with a fair amount of overlap between them. (The later was mostly due a splinter after a server issue with data loss upset some members of the community)
Some of the coolest hardware projects IMO:
BlueSCSI - Emulates SCSI hard drives, CD ROMs, and now even does WiFi, reads the data off an SD card. There are at least two other SCSI emulators I know of that are quite similar.
Floppy EMU Also reads from an SD card, acts as a floppy drive. Much more convenient than actual floppies.
SE/30 and IIfx Logic board recreations for repairing a battery bombed logic board.
Internal Grey Scale Card this is a clone of a Micron Exceed card which are very very hard to find.
And then software:
Macintosh Garden - Archives probably almost all vintage Mac software.
Fix a Fork - To fix resource forks, usually such a pain
BlueSCSI Toolbox - lets you copy files from the BlueSCSI SD card to your Mac, outside the disk images on the SD card.
Netatalk 4.0 a work in progress, but the plan is to keep maintaining Netatalk with support for very old protocols so you an do filesharing with very old Macs.
The pace is not always super fast, but there is quite a bit going on, and a lot of support for people archiving old software, documentation and resurrecting old damaged computers.
I agree, but Gopher is bad and aged badly with many out-of-place media types, etc. No big player supports it anyway, so why not build something new?
Computing is generally short-lived, just think of the BBC doomsday computer.
No major digital storage medium lasts longer than 35 years (except maybe M-Disc, but I refer to the technologies the majority of data is stored on): CD-Rs fail after 8 years, HDDs after 5-10, tape/floppies after 30-35 years. Pressed CDs/DVDs/BluRays maybe 80-100 years, but the majority of data is not pressed on disks. More and more of my Atari 2600 games stop working as ROMs only hold data for 30-50 years.
Data archival (e.g. here in underground vaults in Germany) is mostly done on microfilm, which however also only lasts around 600-800 years.
One major solar eruption and we would be sent back to the bronze age, especially because we rely too much on technology.
One would have to completely rethink computing. You can store terabytes of data on glass disks as small as a Tamagotchi, and glass lasts billions of years, however, only very few care about anything longer than their lifespan.
As a user of Classic Mac OS during that era, the “fetching” dialog startled me because it has a very similar shape to the “Sorry, a system error occurred” window that would pop up when old Macs went cattywampus.
Yep! Just set the hostname/IP in the app’s settings window and it will fetch it from there. The proxy just needs to forward any path request to a wikipedia.org host.
Wow. I don’t usually like to make “everything is worse now” comments, but, I really wonder how dwindling the pool of sites/services are that let you collect such simple data that it can be viewed in such a constrained environment and still have nearly it’s full user experience. Using any part of the modern internet now feels like it’s in this new world untouchable by yesterday’s technology, and seeing modern Wikipedia in such an old OS kinda shook me. Stuff like this makes me wish Gopher managed to gain traction.
I really appreciate jcs’ work tinkering with such an unsupported platform, it warms my heart. I always love seeing that stuff, from the communities around OS/2 to PalmOS, and especially FreeDOS (I actually own a physical copy of the FreeDOS Kernel book by the late Pat Villani), to be honest, I find it kind of a shame that old Mac OS/System software doesn’t have the same community MS-DOS does. We need to keep this old technology alive, before our technology becomes a new Antikythera mechanism for future generations (kind of an exaggeration, but there are a lot of people who are genuinely curious/confused about the evolution of computers).
As someone who hasn’t really used DOS in modern times (outside of flashing her graphics card BIOS), I would have assumed classic Mac OS has a more vibrant community.
Just this past year, VirtIO drivers for Classic Mac OS and a port of Windows NT 4.0 to Old World PowerPC Mac hardware have been released, just off the top of my head.
That said, the world of DOS is probably a little more accessible today than retro Macs, considering PCs still boot in real mode when Apple’s switched CPU architectures twice over since then.
I have no knowledge about the DOS community, but I do pay attention to the vintage Mac community on occasion.
There are at least two quite active communities for vintage Macs with a moderate amount of new software being written and a kind of surprising amount of new hardware.
They are: https://68kmla.org/ and https://tinkerdifferent.com with a fair amount of overlap between them. (The later was mostly due a splinter after a server issue with data loss upset some members of the community)
Some of the coolest hardware projects IMO:
And then software:
The pace is not always super fast, but there is quite a bit going on, and a lot of support for people archiving old software, documentation and resurrecting old damaged computers.
I myself have a Macintosh SE/30 and a Quadra 700.
I agree, but Gopher is bad and aged badly with many out-of-place media types, etc. No big player supports it anyway, so why not build something new?
Computing is generally short-lived, just think of the BBC doomsday computer.
No major digital storage medium lasts longer than 35 years (except maybe M-Disc, but I refer to the technologies the majority of data is stored on): CD-Rs fail after 8 years, HDDs after 5-10, tape/floppies after 30-35 years. Pressed CDs/DVDs/BluRays maybe 80-100 years, but the majority of data is not pressed on disks. More and more of my Atari 2600 games stop working as ROMs only hold data for 30-50 years.
Data archival (e.g. here in underground vaults in Germany) is mostly done on microfilm, which however also only lasts around 600-800 years.
One major solar eruption and we would be sent back to the bronze age, especially because we rely too much on technology.
One would have to completely rethink computing. You can store terabytes of data on glass disks as small as a Tamagotchi, and glass lasts billions of years, however, only very few care about anything longer than their lifespan.
A sad reality within this big picture.
:)
excessive avoidance of globals, perhaps?
I just enjoyed the comment!
As a user of Classic Mac OS during that era, the “fetching” dialog startled me because it has a very similar shape to the “Sorry, a system error occurred” window that would pop up when old Macs went cattywampus.
The double-outlined dialog box is the standard UI element for any modal dialog box in system 6.
Would it be possible to use an http proxy on your local network instead of CloudFlare?
Yep! Just set the hostname/IP in the app’s settings window and it will fetch it from there. The proxy just needs to forward any path request to a
wikipedia.orghost.To use nginx, it would look like this: