I started out in the 90s with telnet, gopher, et al on a Mac IIci, and a 386 that had Win 3.10 and Trumpet winsock installed. Sun/SGI were user friendly-ish. I suppose there was bigger iron available, and a few home computers that tcpip was backported to. But they'd be harder to come by.
Ask HN: Oldest piece of hardware a user could access the internet with?
11–20 of 54 posts
Re: Ask HN: Oldest piece of hardware a user could access the internet with?
#12"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…
Going by the scenario in the first paragraph 1930 might be your answer. Here is a video of a 1930 teletype connected to a linux machine:
Re: Ask HN: Oldest piece of hardware a user could access the internet with?
#13I 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.
Modern web meaning bloated as hell, or motherfingwebsite and jquery?
Minimums range from Pentium 90 to a ten year old i3. RAM would be a large factor as well for modern.
Re: Ask HN: Oldest piece of hardware a user could access the internet with?
#14I 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.
modern web? Lynx Web browser is still being maintained!:) You can use it to search google or wikipedia. You can run Lynx on a 8086 CPU. If I remember correctly, Lynx can display images, if you download it one by one:)
If you want video, but not go with an Amiga with a modern add-on card, you're probably looking at a Pentium PC.
Re: Ask HN: Oldest piece of hardware a user could access the internet with?
#15There has to be a joke about fingering and gophers in this somewhere!
Re: Ask HN: Oldest piece of hardware a user could access the internet with?
#16"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
Yes Internet is old, the web is more recent (1990)
Re: Ask HN: Oldest piece of hardware a user could access the internet with?
#17"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.
I think you should upgrade to an analytical engine to have any chance of success...
Re: Ask HN: Oldest piece of hardware a user could access the internet with?
#18At least as old as Commodore 64: http://www.armory.com/~spectre/cwi/hl/shots.html
So, as the guy who wrote that, it's a cheat. It needs a host running a proxy which does the translation. Yes, I used it myself for some years.
Re: Ask HN: Oldest piece of hardware a user could access the internet with?
#19There has to be a joke about fingering and gophers in this somewhere!
Yes, I am a huge proponent of gopher being period- and capability-appropriate for retrocomputing.
Re: Ask HN: Oldest piece of hardware a user could access the internet with?
#20I 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.
Do you mean something that, for example, could access TLS 1.2? I hacked up such a thing that works on a number of my old boxes, including NeXSTEP and A/UX. The oldest system I got it to work on is a Mac IIci running NetBSD without a cache card; it needs about 22 seconds to do a TLS 1.2 transaction with a local server, but it works.
https://oldvcr.blogspot.com/2020/11/fun-with-crypto-ancienne...