If a minimal modification/add-on could permit an even older device, please include.
Ask HN: Oldest piece of hardware a user could access the internet with?
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Re: Ask HN: Oldest piece of hardware a user could access the internet with?
#2Re: Ask HN: Oldest piece of hardware a user could access the internet with?
#3"Accessing the internet" is a fairly broad term. In general, all machines supporting IPv4 and some sort of interface (UART for SLIP/PPP or Ethernet) can access the internet. However, older machines will not be able to use more modern services like ssh or the web due to compute power or memory limitations and you will obviously not be able to connect to IPv6-only hosts.
So, for example a PDP11 running 2.9BSD (e.g. a 11/70 from 1975) should suffice, but there are other machines of similar vintage that support IPv4. You can also try putting a virtual PDP11 on the net using the simh emulator (http://simh.trailing-edge.com) and 2.9BSD from TUHS (https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Distributions/UCB/2.9BSD/).
Re: Ask HN: Oldest piece of hardware a user could access the internet with?
#4Re: Ask HN: Oldest piece of hardware a user could access the internet with?
#5At least as old as Commodore 64: http://www.armory.com/~spectre/cwi/hl/shots.html
Re: Ask HN: Oldest piece of hardware a user could access the internet with?
#6I just realized the semi-stupidity of my question. I should have said "modern web", considering the ARPANET could be considered a type of "internet" (?) that ran using hardware from 1969?
Thank you for the replies though, something to read up on.
Re: Ask HN: Oldest piece of hardware a user could access the internet with?
#7"access"... If you wanted, an old vt100/vt220 or whatever other hardware serial terminal you like can be connected to a linux or other system and access a shell account with text browsers etc. In that scenario the terminal is "accessing the internet". (Did this with a Televideo 970 in 2007 iirc for the ebay listing where we sold it)
If you want something to run an IP stack, then a 286 running `ka9qnos` is about as small as can do hardly anything useful, probably. There might be a c64 IP stack but at that point its getting technicality again; how much access and function counts?
If you're looking for paranoid security in cheap hardware, 486 for absolute purists (runs linux handily, good luck with the graphics, matrox card ruled), and up to .. ppro? p3? or so if you're slightly less pure.
Or get Sparc 5 or alpha or etc "exotic" hardware of that era and have an extra layer of obscurity plus years of unpatched security holes in any software you can make run today.
Re: Ask HN: Oldest piece of hardware a user could access the internet with?
#8"access"... If you wanted, an old vt100/vt220 or whatever other hardware serial terminal you like can be connected to a linux or other system and access a shell account with text browsers etc. In that scenario the terminal is "accessing the internet". (Did this with a Televideo 970 in 2007 iirc for the ebay listing where we sold it) If you want something to run an IP stack, then a 286 running `ka9qnos` is about as sm…
I'm going to see if I can make a Facebook account using a Difference Engine over the weekend. Report back shortly.
Re: Ask HN: Oldest piece of hardware a user could access the internet with?
#9"Accessing the internet" is a fairly broad term. In general, all machines supporting IPv4 and some sort of interface (UART for SLIP/PPP or Ethernet) can access the internet. However, older machines will not be able to use more modern services like ssh or the web due to compute power or memory limitations and you will obviously not be able to connect to IPv6-only hosts. So, for example a PDP11 running 2.9BSD (e.g. a 1…
Thank you for the history lesson! I had no idea IPv4 was so old
Re: Ask HN: Oldest piece of hardware a user could access the internet with?
#10"access"... If you wanted, an old vt100/vt220 or whatever other hardware serial terminal you like can be connected to a linux or other system and access a shell account with text browsers etc. In that scenario the terminal is "accessing the internet". (Did this with a Televideo 970 in 2007 iirc for the ebay listing where we sold it) If you want something to run an IP stack, then a 286 running `ka9qnos` is about as sm…
I think some distributions have moved towards requiring a 686 class (ppro/pII) machine.
It really depends on how much modern web you want to do. TLS is significant overhead on older machines. And javascript heavy sites can bring modern machines to a crawl.