Using the Internet on old Computers

[pete_w]

One of my hobbies is fixing and playing old laptops from the 80s/90s. Trying to surf the internet on these is nigh on impossible these days of course. However help is at hand.

First of all we have http://www.frogfind.com - This converts a large number of todays websites to just text and images so they load quickly and tidily on old computers e.g. http://www.frogfind.com/read.php?a=https://retrogamecoders.com/mister-fpga-tutorial-getting-started-with-mister/ - not very good with forums though for obvious reasons but apart from that its very readable

then we have https://theoldnet.com/ - This uses archive.org and others to do a search on whatever year you specify, including a proxy where you specify the port as a year and it will base searches on it

No network card on the device but have a serial port no problem, use a raspberry pi to create a fake "dial up proxy" - https://metalbabble.wordpress.com/2020/02/08/the-final-frontier-connecting-a-macintosh-se-to-the-internet-with-a-raspberry-pi/ 

Other ideas, you can create a proxy server using https://github.com/tenox7/wrp - this uses the chrome engine on a server which then sends the page back to the browser as a GIF or PNG file along with image mapping so it can respond to your clicks.

For slightly newer browsers there is the much better https://github.com/ttalvitie/browservice - this needs a slightly newer browser (mostly windows biased) but is much faster and uses javascript on the client end so is more flexible for input.

Other sites include http://68k.news/ - which is a text only version of Google News, which also converts the linked articles to text.

[SocialDragon368]

Ribbit

[woodsy]

Jeepers that’s great info, I’d be lost without iPhone tbh. Have bad memories of dial up!!! Sounds fun though, Wolf on my486 was class I have to say