Human brain. IP protocol is computable by humans. There is even RFC for transferring packets over pigeons.
Ask HN: Oldest piece of hardware a user could access the internet with?
31–40 of 54 posts
Re: Ask HN: Oldest piece of hardware a user could access the internet with?
#32As of RFC 1149 [1], I guess a pigeon?
Re: Ask HN: Oldest piece of hardware a user could access the internet with?
#33As of RFC 1149 [1], I guess a pigeon? [1]: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1149
But a pigeon can only live for about six years.
Re: Ask HN: Oldest piece of hardware a user could access the internet with?
#34There has to be a joke about fingering and gophers in this somewhere!
Don't be a WAIS guy!
Re: Ask HN: Oldest piece of hardware a user could access the internet with?
#35I 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.
The oldest device I have actually used to access a web site was a Sun SparcStation 20, built ca. 1992-93.
However, at 64MB RAM, accessing the "modern web" would be extremely, painfully slow, at best. In fact, the memory-hunger of modern browsers renders older machines practically unusable faster these days than any other factor, at least that has been my experience.
Re: Ask HN: Oldest piece of hardware a user could access the internet with?
#36I 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.
Even that leaves a lot of room. If you can fix certificate problems, any simple browser (even text mode lynx) can still do a lot these days.
But let's go really "modern", i.e. being able to access web applications without missing features, timeouts etc. Slower, maybe just one at a time, but what you do works.
That's surprisingly hard. I sometimes use TenFourFox, a browser for Power Macs, which is a bit of a mashup between older versions that were still supported and back-ported newer features. And that can run on a quad core G5. I'd say that still misses the mark, but might come close enough. With a G4, that would bring you to maybe 2002's tech.
But in the end, for a lot of modern stuff you're basically required to have an "Evergreen" browser or IE11. On Windows, that means Windows 7, which IIRC won't run on Pentium IVs and requires about 1 Ghz/1 Gig RAM. So 2005/2006's tech.
On Linux, you can go lower. There's still 32 bit Linux support for Firefox, so if you can get a recent enough distro on an old computer, it should work. A core solo definitely does, and I guess a souped up Pentium IV should work well enough, too. Beyond that, it's going to get interesting. Pentium II's should work and you can give them enough RAM to chug along with a recent OS. So that' about 1998/1999.
Beyond that, CPU speed and max RAM will result in some breakage.
Re: Ask HN: Oldest piece of hardware a user could access the internet with?
#37I 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.
By web, do you mean websites? Does that include images? JavaScript?
Re: Ask HN: Oldest piece of hardware a user could access the internet with?
#38Not sure if this counts, but I wrote my first program in 1972, when I was 8 years old. On an old mechanical teletype, connected via an acoustically coupled modem to a mainframe in the other end of the city. I only saw the BASIC interpreter, but my father told that they were doing some calculations abroad, even in the US, where he could get cheaper night time when it was daytime in Finland.
Edit: Those remote jobs were most likely batch jobs, and I am not sure how they got the stuff over, may not have been over a network connection.
Re: Ask HN: Oldest piece of hardware a user could access the internet with?
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
If we're just talking IP and not a full blown browser experience, the original IBM PC is enough. Add an ISA NIC and you're ready to go. With mTCP you got a suite of tools like htget for http downloads, an ftp server, an IRC client, ... 640kb is enough for everybody. ;-)
im not looking at that (im certain wonderful cool) tool. it would hurt. in 1994 i had a 286, ka9q and uucp, to serve email and Usenet to a small number of users. No NICs, all serial. nonprofit IT budgets. it sucked but im grateful still to those whose software made it possible.
In 1994, as a teenager, dial-up Internet was a long-distance phone call and, unfortunately, was off-limits for me at the time anyways. After racking up a bunch of monthly phone bills of several hundreds of dollars each, the extra phone extension I had ran (under the house) to my bedroom had been discovered by $parental_unit and promptly yanked out -- effectively DoS'ing me off the Internet for a long while.
Fortunately, I also had a 286, KA9Q -- [0], not [1] -- a KPC-3 TNC [2] [EDIT: Actually, it may have been an MFJ-1270 (?) at that time], a handheld 2m transceiver, and a ham radio license whose ink was still wet -- having first seen this combination demonstrated to me in 1992. It may not sound like much -- and it certainly wasn't -- but it was enough to get me connected to AMPRNet [3]!
Thanks to the technological wonders of 1200 baud, half-duplex packet radio -- with something that just barely passed for "collision detection") -- I was able to chat daily with other amateur radio operators all over the world, send and receive mail, and even download files. (Understand that this "1200 baud" was nowhere close to the speed of a 1200 baud modem on a phone line -- which I would have been grateful for at that point!).
It was also my introduction to TCP/IP. Nowadays, I'm a network engineer. No surprise there!
Interestingly, six or seven years ago, perhaps, I randomly ended up on a phone call -- out of the blue -- with Phil, KA9Q. I worked for an ISP at the time and can't remember what the call was about (something work-related, obviously) but the owner walked in, handed me a piece of paper with a name and phone number and asked me to call the guy to discuss $deity-knows-what. (I did, obviously, and of course I had to ask "Are you THE Phil Karn?". He was. I'm sure he would never remember that but I certainly do!)
A few months ago, KA9Q -- [1], not [0] -- created an HN account [4] and commented [5] on a thread (about the sale to Amazon of a /10 of 44/8) and I took the opportunity to thank him in a reply, even though I assumed he probably wouldn't see it.
(Somehow, ~25 years later, I still have 44.48.0.105 although it hasn't been "active" since I don't know when... maybe I'll resurrect it someday!)
--
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KA9Q
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Karn
[2]: https://kantronics.com/kpc-3/
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMPRNet
Re: Ask HN: Oldest piece of hardware a user could access the internet with?
#40As of RFC 1149 [1], I guess a pigeon? [1]: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1149
But a pigeon can only live for about six years.
'Domesticated pigeon 1.0' was developed about 10,000 years ago and although none of the first run are still around, the model design has been pretty much the same since.