An interesting update to a 27-year-old Mac Plus

These days, little surprises us anymore, given all the inventions and concepts surrounding Apple. But this time, our surprise will be even greater when we realize that something almost impossible to achieve—or at least not anymore in this era where technology is focused on the future and projects toward the new and innovative—has been accomplished.

Jeff Keacher is the person who has so far successfully hacked one of the Mac Plus computers from 27 years ago, ingeniously enabling it to be used today, thus allowing users to browse the web on the old computer.

The Mac Plus has an 8 MHz CPU , 4 MB of RAM, a 50 MB hard drive, and a 512 x 342 pixel black and white screen . To achieve his goals, Keacher used a TCP/IP stack to find a way to connect the computer to his home network.

The web browser was relatively easy for him to find. But the difficulty lay in MacWeb 2.0 , which was apparently quite large to run on the Plus, and new enough to be rendered using HTML and HTTP.

Getting the computer to connect to the network was the most difficult part of this project, since the Mac Plus doesn't have an Ethernet port, and Wi-Fi connections weren't invented until a few years after this model was manufactured. However , Keacher managed to establish the connection using a Raspberry Pi setup connected to his router, with the help of a level shifter, a working serial cable between the Pi and the Mac, and some adapters available at the time.

On the other hand, the software would need MacTCP to communicate with MacPPP, since MacPPP is compatible with SLiRP and SLiRP over Ethernet. Unfortunately, MacWeb doesn't support names like Host, HTTPS, Cookies, and CSS. But Keacher contacted a friend about the issue, and together they were able to put together a filtering solution using Python, Requests, and Flask that would get them closer to their goal.

Finally, after arduous work, it was possible to navigate the web of the old Apple computer , and although the navigation is incredibly slow, in the end it was demonstrated that with ingenuity and a lot of skill, it is possible to update the historic Mac Plus from 27 years ago in a certain way.

More details here: Keacher.com