Vintage Macintosh meets modern internet with MacProxy Plus
When Hunter Irving picked up a dusty Macintosh Plus at a local thrift store, he knew he wanted to get it online, but didn’t expect today’s web to be so unfriendly toward vintage machines. It seems modern web developers just aren’t designing their sites with 80’s computers in mind. Unwilling to accept defeat, Hunter hacked together a solution to make browsing the modern web on vintage hardware a breeze.
MacProxy Plus (an enhanced fork of the popular MacProxy project) adds support for “extensions”, which intercept HTTP requests and route them through some custom handling, stripping out all CSS and JavaScript to serve super-simplified HTML.
Today, these extensions include:
Weather (get the forecast for any zip code)
ChatGPT (chat with any of OpenAI’s models via a web interface that hits
their API)
Anthropic Claude (for the discerning LLM connoisseur)
Wikipedia (read any of over 6 million encyclopedia articles – complete
with clickable links and search function)
Reddit (browse any subreddit or the Reddit homepage, with support for
nested comments and downloadable images… in dithered black and white)
WayBack Machine (Enter any date between January 1st, 1993 and today, then
browse the web as it existed at that point in time. Something about browsing
vintage websites on a vintage computer just feels right. Includes full
download support for images and other files backed up by the Internet
Archive)
Web Simulator (type a url that doesn’t exist into the address bar, and
Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet will interpret the domain and any query
parameters to generate an imagined version of that page on the fly. Each
HTTP request is serialized and sent to the AI, along with the full HTML of
the last 3 pages you visited, allowing you to explore a vast, interconnected
alternate reality Internet where the only limit is your imagination)
– (not) YouTube (a legally distinct parody of YouTube, which uses the
fantastic homebrew application MacFlim (macflim.com/macflim2 ; created by
Fred Stark) to encode video files as a series of dithered black and white
frames. Hunter uses it to play back Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up” as
well as Shrek and a Betty Boop cartoon. All were surprisingly watchable (all
on just 4MB of RAM!)
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