Live data from Hacker News

Ssheven: A modern SSH client for Mac OS 7-9

github.com

51–60 of 137 posts

Re: Ssheven: A modern SSH client for Mac OS 7-9

#51
post #31
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Once you have authenticated each other and agree to a nice symmetric cipher and exchange the keys for that, yes. Bytes, even kilobytes per second. But note the "once you have authenticated". Public key crypto is brutal number crunching and takes minutes to hours on systems of the 80s, and some noticeable seconds even in the late 90s. I think that's why something like RSA-4096 was not just universally adopted 30 years…

even the crappiest laptop CPU can do 10000 x 4096-bit RSA signature verifications per second my 2014 laptop (on battery, no hardware acceleration): sign verify sign/s verify/s rsa 4096 bits 0.006200s 0.000096s 161.3 10468.9 (not to mention everyone's using ec these days, which is quite a bit faster)

We’re talking about an unoptimized 1990’s 44mhz CPU here aren’t we?

How is it at all comparable to a relatively state of the art 2014 laptop?

Re: Ssheven: A modern SSH client for Mac OS 7-9

#52
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

even the crappiest laptop CPU can do 10000 x 4096-bit RSA signature verifications per second my 2014 laptop (on battery, no hardware acceleration): sign verify sign/s verify/s rsa 4096 bits 0.006200s 0.000096s 161.3 10468.9 (not to mention everyone's using ec these days, which is quite a bit faster)

It just occurred to me while reading this comment that people born after Intel CPUs mostly leveled out perfwise are probably peers now. That realization came hard, it came fast, and I wasn’t ready to live with that knowledge by a long shot. It was a long, long road to your 2014 laptop, friend. There was a time when division was a luxury, and desperate folk offered their firstborn for forbidden tricks to compute inver…

[deleted]

Re: Ssheven: A modern SSH client for Mac OS 7-9

#53

>input latency feels high because redrawing the screen is slow (along with all the encryption, which is also slow) Is modern encryption a challenge to those old machines? Is it because of specialized encryption hardware or sheer brute force? Or is it just this implementation that's slow? I used telnet back in the 68k days.

the crypto code actually has some 68020 assembly (credit to the mbedtls devs), it could probably be made faster, but I would need to sharpen my assembly skills a lot

doing the initial key exchange before timeout is barely possible for a 68030 at 16MHz, takes the better part of a minute!

of course, on the later PPC machines it's a complete non-issue

Re: Ssheven: A modern SSH client for Mac OS 7-9

#54
post #22

Oh wow, thank you for this. :) I was just restoring an iMac G3, the Flower Power edition, and ran into more trouble than I expected trying to transfer data via a USB flash drive. Filesystems that Mac OS 9 should support were either not mounting properly or causing errors during file transfer when formatted on a modern Apple or Linux system (exFAT was the only one I could get to work for some reason). I’ve been casual…

unfortunately, file transfer isn't in yet, but it's the next feature I'm working on, probably within a week or two

Re: Ssheven: A modern SSH client for Mac OS 7-9

#55

i believe that before OSX, the OS itself had no terminal/shell/command prompt, and I suspect Macs were very rarely used for development back then; it was only with Unix-based OSX that it became hugely popular.

Who WAS Apple's customer base during the classic MacOS era? I remember Apple II's dominating when I was in school back in the 1980's. Then in the 1990's when I was in college, all I remember seeing anywhere were PC's. DOS and then Windows for the masses, and this new thing called Slackware Linux for many of us in the CS department. In the 2000's I started hearing about Macs, but only for creative domains like Photosh…

Desktop publishing, especially after the release of the LaserWriter: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaserWriter

It used to be really hard to get printer output to look the same on the page as what you saw on the screen, and the small details matter when people are laying out a complicated magazine (or whatever) page and need text to flow around images and other design elements. There was a whole Adobe-vs-everyone battle over things like outline (as opposed to bitmap) font technology since they controlled the standard for PostScript fonts as used by printers like LaserWriter: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PostScript_fonts#Type_1

Then Apple created TrueType, and it is the biggest feature of System 7 that I never see anyone talk about: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TrueType

Then still lots of back and forth over things like Adobe's multi-master fonts vs TrueType GX which despite being part of the "failed" QuickDraw GX actually lives on in OpenType today:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_master_fonts

https://atadistance.net/2016/09/20/truetype-gx-model-lives-o...

https://tidbits.com/1994/09/26/preliminary-practical-primer-...

---

e: "magazine page" is what always comes to mind because it makes me think of the Diehard GameFAN story:

http://www.hardcoregaming101.net/gamefan/GameFAN.htm

"he calls the layout artist (which was probably Jacob Riskin or George Weising at the time), 'my trusty [Macintosh] Quadra operator'. What an assface."

Re: Ssheven: A modern SSH client for Mac OS 7-9

#56
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For classic macs with ethernet ports, the simplest method I have found is to host a basic FTP server on another computer (e.g. you can set one up easily enough on a Raspberry Pi) and use an Ftp client such as Fetch on the mac side. I use this method to get files to and from my LC III, which also functions as a bridge baby to the really old macs via the Appletalk serial port.

This is what I do, and it works pretty well if a little cumbersome at times. I have a little museum I've built in my office during the pandemic that consists of: - SE/30 - Docked Duo 280c - 7100/80 - PowerComputing PT Pro 250 - NeXT TurboStation My primary Linux workstation is where I browse for old software and download it, then I get at stuff from the vintage Macs via FTP using either Interarchy or Fetch. Rather th…

Neat! I just have an LC III, SE and Powerbook 1400 running at the moment. Always wanted to find a NeXT...

> Rather than run a bunch of Ethernet cables all over the place I put little Ethernet to Wifi bridge adapters on them. Works great.

That's genius, thanks for the tip.

Re: Ssheven: A modern SSH client for Mac OS 7-9

#57
post #49

oh hey everyone, author here, ssheven is still beta quality, so I wasn't really posting about it anywhere yet, but it's usable and has the core functionality working ok I plan to do a writeup about it, and the experience of developing for old macs, once I finish the 1.0 release edit: btw, this is my first project for the classic Mac OS, I hope to inspire others to also jump in, retro68 is a very usable toolchain (big…

This is so cool. I've been wanting to pick up an older mac for the sole purpose of doing some programming on classic MacOS myself. I actually have a Macintosh SE, but it's a bit too underpowered for my tastes. Anyway, I was hoping you might be willing to share what your development environment looks like. Language, editor, etc. Thanks!

Edit: I think I started to reply before your edit. Retro68 sounds amazing!

Re: Ssheven: A modern SSH client for Mac OS 7-9

#58

>input latency feels high because redrawing the screen is slow (along with all the encryption, which is also slow) Is modern encryption a challenge to those old machines? Is it because of specialized encryption hardware or sheer brute force? Or is it just this implementation that's slow? I used telnet back in the 68k days.

Why is redrawing the screen slow? Old Macs had pretty good DMA for 2D sprites IIRC. As for encryption, can you use a preshared key instead of public key?

more specifically, I should say that re-rendering everything is kinda slow, the DrawText function which, uh, draws text, seems very heavy

blitting from a buffer onto the screen is, indeed, pretty fast, I've been experimenting with it and have some ideas for speeding things up

Re: Ssheven: A modern SSH client for Mac OS 7-9

#59
post #20
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re holding it wrong..this is for connecting a classic Mac to a Raspberry Pi.

I think you misread, maybe

Nope. You want to run a Classic MacOS emulator on rPi to test SSH for MacOS, but that makes no sense.

Re: Ssheven: A modern SSH client for Mac OS 7-9

#60
post #31
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Once you have authenticated each other and agree to a nice symmetric cipher and exchange the keys for that, yes. Bytes, even kilobytes per second. But note the "once you have authenticated". Public key crypto is brutal number crunching and takes minutes to hours on systems of the 80s, and some noticeable seconds even in the late 90s. I think that's why something like RSA-4096 was not just universally adopted 30 years…

even the crappiest laptop CPU can do 10000 x 4096-bit RSA signature verifications per second my 2014 laptop (on battery, no hardware acceleration): sign verify sign/s verify/s rsa 4096 bits 0.006200s 0.000096s 161.3 10468.9 (not to mention everyone's using ec these days, which is quite a bit faster)

Since you mention EC, it uses floating point. Good ol' FLOPS is not a wholly useless metric there. The first commercial processor sold with a floating point unit integrated was the 486 in 1989. Some rough, unsourced numbers:

    1984 - Cray X-MP (expensive!)         800 MFLOPS  
    1989 - Intel 486 @ 33 MHz             3 
    1993 - Pentium @ 60 MHz               10
    1997 - Pentium II @ 233 MHz           200
    2000 - Pentium III @ 1000 MHz         2000
    2004 - Pentium 4 @ 2800 MHz           5650 
    2007 - Core Quad @ 2400 MHz           38400 
    2009 - Core i7-950 @ 3100 MHz         92820
    2013 - Apple A7 (smartphone)          115000
    2020 - Apple M1                       2844000
A FP calculation that takes 1 second on an Apple M1 will take 11 hours on the original Pentium, approximately. Hope that gives some perspective.
Post reply on HN