The rest of the parts I ordered / had made for the 8100 came in this afternoon – save for the BlueSCSI boxes which haven’t shipped yet – so the evening was spent creating the most upgraded 8100/80 in human history… At least as far as I know.
The first things to do were put the new pram battery in the holder, stick the mainboard back in the case, and then max out the video card…
Once again I was successful in manipulating all of the brittle plastic pieces to snap everything back together, so it was time to press the keyboard’s power button and see if I got a successful boot – or if I would let all of the magic smoke out…
I was apparently successful – go me! Though there was one tiny error:
That line in the photos is the scan line of the monitor being picked up by my iPhone – you can’t see these normally, but the iPhone doesn’t have persistence of vision so there they are… Just ignore them. 🙂
Anyway, the operation was a success – so the next thing to do was set the clock…
Macintoshes back in the day were generally immune to the Y2K bug, but the engineers and programmers working on OS8 in 1997 seemed to be of the mind that no sane person would be using the OS after 2019… So while the actual clock is good until 2040, the date picker rolls over on December 31, 2019 to the mid 1900’s.
This is actually a pretty easy fix though; just get the 8100 onto the internet so it can see an NTP (time) server.
Getting the machine on the Internet was a simple matter of hooking up the Farallon AAUI adapter, stringing cat-5 across my office, and then configuring TCP/IP in a machine and operating system from when TCP-IP was still in diapers… Luckily I did this a lot back in the 90’s – so getting the machine networked was essentially muscle memory.
So, now I had an IP address and a route to the Internet, the date was now showing 2023, and the machine came with Netscape 3.0.something from ’97… Let’s do this!
…
In short, almost nothing on the modern world wide weird will talk to such an old browser. While there was SSL back in 1997, it was pretty primitive and doesn’t apply to modern TLS encryption, and nothing really does plain old HTTP anymore – and even if something did, Netscape 3 simply doesn’t understand modern HTML, scripts, or even graphic standards.
There is ‘frog find‘ though, which is a modern web to ancient computer search engine translator that one can at least use to verify connectivity. And there are Macintosh software archive sites like macintoshrepository.org where you can get cool old abandonware… Said site even congratulates you for using an actual old Mac when using an actual old Mac – but the site is too new for Netscape 3 to figure out…
What I needed was a newer browser – something like Classilla, the unofficial last-gasp of Mozilla compiled for MacOS 8.6 – 9.2 machines. This was child’s play to download with Safari on my M2 laptop but impossible for Netscape 3 on the 8100, so what I needed was a really basic web server on my laptop that Netscape 3 would understand and be able to use…
Ten minutes later and I had Netscape 3 downloading Classilla_9.3.3.sit from Apache on my laptop – which took about three minutes, and then required another three minutes to unstuff. But once that was done it was possible to get the old 8100 onto the information superhighway! (Albeit really slow, in the breakdown lane, with the hazards on…)
Fortunately I maxed out the ram in the 8100, because Classilla – being ‘new’ code from an era where size doesn’t matter – eats up a lot of system memory…
Anyway, once I got the ability to peruse and download stuff, I spent the evening filling the old SCSI HD with period correct games and apps, and hanging out in late 1995. 🙂
Listening to "Youth" by The Midnight