Plugging a 1986 Mac Plus into the Modern Web With the Help of a Raspberry Pi @Raspberry_Pi #piday #raspberrypi
Jeff Keacher wrote about his experience hooking up his vintage Mac to the internet using a raspberry pi here on The Kernel.
Getting the Mac physically hooked to the network was a bigger challenge. The Mac Plus didn’t have an Ethernet port, and things like Wi-Fi were years from being invented when it was manufactured. A couple of companies made SCSI-to-Ethernet adapters about 15 years ago, but those were rare and expensive. I thought about the problem for a while, and it occurred to me that I could channel the early days again: I could use the serial port and PPP or SLIP to bridge to the outside world. Like dialup without the modem.
I set up my Raspberry Pi and ran some Cat-5 to it from the router. Using a level shifter and a variety of old adapters, I managed to get a serial cable working between the Pi and the Mac. That took care of the hardware.
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