"Accessing the internet" is a fairly broad term. In general, all machines supporting IPv4 and some sort of interface (UART for SLIP/PPP or Ethernet) can access the internet. However, older machines will not be able to use more modern services like ssh or the web due to compute power or memory limitations and you will obviously not be able to connect to IPv6-only hosts.
So, for example a PDP11 running 2.9BSD (e.g. a 11/70 from 1975) should suffice, but there are other machines of similar vintage that support IPv4. You can also try putting a virtual PDP11 on the net using the simh emulator (http://simh.trailing-edge.com) and 2.9BSD from TUHS (https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Distributions/UCB/2.9BSD/).
OK, but wait. 2.9BSD is from like 1982. And I think SLIP was later than that, and PPP was definitely much later than that. So you don't have a "pure" 1975 machine; you're using later software. What does "support" mean, then?
If you're allowed to use software that's later than your hardware, then you can write a stack for almost anything, so the idea of a machine "supporting IPv4" becomes kind of meaningless. You need 576 bytes of memory for a packet buffer, plus your program. Any mid-sixties mainframe, maybe even older.
If you do count the age of the software in deciding what's "supported", and you require that the TCP/IP stack run locally and communicate with modern computers without translation, then you'll have a hard limit at about 1980 or 1981, since the TCP and IPv4 protocols weren't defined until then, and there was therefore definitely no software.
You could allow using NCP as a "legitimate Internet precursor" to TCP/IP, but if you do that there's no real reason not to just allow serial terminals as "legitimate precursors" to NCP. So 1980 or 1981 seems like the limit for a "pure" system with its own software.
If you allow software newer than the hardware, but limit yourself to not writing that software, my guess is that the oldest thing would be a KA-10, which is a 1968 computer. RFC 801 says that as of 1981, there was a stack for TENEX, which you could run on a KA-10. You could at least do Telnet, maybe FTP. That's assuming you can find another old computer to gateway whatever ancient serial protocols it was using at the physical layer.
I just realized the semi-stupidity of my question. I should have said "modern web", considering the ARPANET could be considered a type of "internet" (?) that ran using hardware from 1969?
Thank you for the replies though, something to read up on.
modern web? Lynx Web browser is still being maintained!:) You can use it to search google or wikipedia. You can run Lynx on a 8086 CPU. If I remember correctly, Lynx can display images, if you download it one by one:)
If you want video, but not go with an Amiga with a modern add-on card, you're probably looking at a Pentium PC.
Do you mean something that, for example, could access TLS 1.2? I hacked up such a thing that works on a number of my old boxes, including NeXSTEP and A/UX. The oldest system I got it to work on is a Mac IIci running NetBSD without a cache card; it needs about 22 seconds to do a TLS 1.2 transaction with a local server, but it works.
Huh, wonder where its spending all that time and if different ciphers would make a significant difference. I imagine many of the modern ciphers have hand tuned assembly for 64bit computers but probably not for older computers.
I regularly use the Web most days on an Amiga 4000, built in 1992. It's not perfect for everything, but I can use things like search engines, visit web sites over HTTPS etc. I mostly visit Amiga-specific sites that tend to have lower overheads. I've also visited sites like like Twitter, Facebook, CNN etc. in the past.
It should be possible to use older machines to browse the web but it stops being about the machine and starts being more about availability of TLS libraries and rendering engines. In theory an Amiga 1000 (1985) should be able to connect to the Internet and may be able to run AmiSSL and IBrowse with the right upgrades. It might need custom hardware though. I think there's some jiggery pokery that'll allow older Macs dating back to 85 or maybe 84 (I'd be surprised to see an original 128kb Mac but the late 84 512kb model should work) to browse the web without modern TLS.
Is the 68k port of Netsurf still kept up to date? I assume it would be slow, but Netsurf itself is quite usable, though I wouldn't say it's a modern Internet experience.
Not really. I'm not sure where I got it from but I have several Netsurf versions on my Amiga, including a crash-prone 3.10 build. The last official release is 3.6 I think.
Even so the 3.10 build I have isn't built against current AmiSSL so TLS sites fail. It is slower than say, Voyager Browser and much slower than IBrowse. Netsurf 3.6 is usable if you're patient on an 060/50. Performance is around what I'd expect from a Pentium 75-100 maybe?
I use it because I used them throughout the 90s and just find them really nice machines to use for a lot of things. Almost everything's offline first, but it's functional enough to get things done. Some things are more fiddly, but that's to be expected.
Most of what I do is creative, a mix of Art, music, programming, writing. I've done things like covid data analysis, I've written the odd letter on there, some of my newsletter gets written on there. I also use it for things like Usenet, IRC, Telegram etc. There's also a lot of really good games for it. I've heard classic 68k Mac owners have similar experiences. Of course, some say the Amiga is also the fastest classic Mac[1].
The oldest device I have actually used to access a web site was a Sun SparcStation 20, built ca. 1992-93.
However, at 64MB RAM, accessing the "modern web" would be extremely, painfully slow, at best. In fact, the memory-hunger of modern browsers renders older machines practically unusable faster these days than any other factor, at least that has been my experience.
Even that leaves a lot of room. If you can fix certificate problems, any simple browser (even text mode lynx) can still do a lot these days.
But let's go really "modern", i.e. being able to access web applications without missing features, timeouts etc.
Slower, maybe just one at a time, but what you do works.
That's surprisingly hard. I sometimes use TenFourFox, a browser for Power Macs, which is a bit of a mashup between older versions that were still supported and back-ported newer features. And that can run on a quad core G5.
I'd say that still misses the mark, but might come close enough. With a G4, that would bring you to maybe 2002's tech.
But in the end, for a lot of modern stuff you're basically required to have an "Evergreen" browser or IE11. On Windows, that means Windows 7, which IIRC won't run on Pentium IVs and requires about 1 Ghz/1 Gig RAM. So 2005/2006's tech.
On Linux, you can go lower. There's still 32 bit Linux support for Firefox, so if you can get a recent enough distro on an old computer, it should work. A core solo definitely does, and I guess a souped up Pentium IV should work well enough, too.
Beyond that, it's going to get interesting. Pentium II's should work and you can give them enough RAM to chug along with a recent OS. So that' about 1998/1999.
Beyond that, CPU speed and max RAM will result in some breakage.
I agree on that. If the definition is on modern web with ES2020, TLS 1.2, etc, it limits the choice to Firefox and Chrome. This will exclude any computer that does not have at least:
a. 2gb of ram as my raspberry pi with 1gb ram cannot handle more than 4 tabs in chromium responsively.
b. ssd, connecting to SATA, it makes my 10-year-old thinkpad feels new.
c. enough cpu power to handle 2mb of js
d. hdmi connector
That limits the choices to computers not older than 15 years old, plus minus several years.
"access"... If you wanted, an old vt100/vt220 or whatever other hardware serial terminal you like can be connected to a linux or other system and access a shell account with text browsers etc. In that scenario the terminal is "accessing the internet". (Did this with a Televideo 970 in 2007 iirc for the ebay listing where we sold it)
If you want something to run an IP stack, then a 286 running `ka9qnos` is about as small as can do hardly anything useful, probably. There might be a c64 IP stack but at that point its getting technicality again; how much access and function counts?
If you're looking for paranoid security in cheap hardware, 486 for absolute purists (runs linux handily, good luck with the graphics, matrox card ruled), and up to .. ppro? p3? or so if you're slightly less pure.
Or get Sparc 5 or alpha or etc "exotic" hardware of that era and have an extra layer of obscurity plus years of unpatched security holes in any software you can make run today.
I think some distributions have moved towards requiring a 686 class (ppro/pII) machine.
It really depends on how much modern web you want to do. TLS is significant overhead on older machines. And javascript heavy sites can bring modern machines to a crawl.
If we're just talking IP and not a full blown browser experience, the original IBM PC is enough. Add an ISA NIC and you're ready to go. With mTCP you got a suite of tools like htget for http downloads, an ftp server, an IRC client, ... 640kb is enough for everybody. ;-)
In 1994, as a teenager, dial-up Internet was a long-distance phone call and, unfortunately, was off-limits for me at the time anyways. After racking up a bunch of monthly phone bills of several hundreds of dollars each, the extra phone extension I had ran (under the house) to my bedroom had been discovered by $parental_unit and promptly yanked out -- effectively DoS'ing me off the Internet for a long while.
Fortunately, I also had a 286, KA9Q -- [0], not [1] -- a KPC-3 TNC [2] [EDIT: Actually, it may have been an MFJ-1270 (?) at that time], a handheld 2m transceiver, and a ham radio license whose ink was still wet -- having first seen this combination demonstrated to me in 1992. It may not sound like much -- and it certainly wasn't -- but it was enough to get me connected to AMPRNet [3]!
Thanks to the technological wonders of 1200 baud, half-duplex packet radio -- with something that just barely passed for "collision detection") -- I was able to chat daily with other amateur radio operators all over the world, send and receive mail, and even download files. (Understand that this "1200 baud" was nowhere close to the speed of a 1200 baud modem on a phone line -- which I would have been grateful for at that point!).
It was also my introduction to TCP/IP. Nowadays, I'm a network engineer. No surprise there!
Interestingly, six or seven years ago, perhaps, I randomly ended up on a phone call -- out of the blue -- with Phil, KA9Q. I worked for an ISP at the time and can't remember what the call was about (something work-related, obviously) but the owner walked in, handed me a piece of paper with a name and phone number and asked me to call the guy to discuss $deity-knows-what. (I did, obviously, and of course I had to ask "Are you THE Phil Karn?". He was. I'm sure he would never remember that but I certainly do!)
A few months ago, KA9Q -- [1], not [0] -- created an HN account [4] and commented [5] on a thread (about the sale to Amazon of a /10 of 44/8) and I took the opportunity to thank him in a reply, even though I assumed he probably wouldn't see it.
(Somehow, ~25 years later, I still have 44.48.0.105 although it hasn't been "active" since I don't know when... maybe I'll resurrect it someday!)
> "access"... If you wanted, an old vt100/vt220 or whatever other hardware serial terminal you like can be connected to a linux or other system and access a shell account with text browsers etc. In that scenario the terminal is "accessing the internet". (Did this with a Televideo 970 in 2007 iirc for the ebay listing where we sold it)
By this standard, I'm accessing the Internet using a flat-panel display.
If something isn't running its own TCP/IP stack, it isn't accessing the Internet.
> There might be a c64 IP stack but at that point its getting technicality again; how much access and function counts?
Being able to talk at least IP and TCP without external help.
> > There might be a c64 IP stack but at that point its getting technicality again; how much access and function counts?
> Being able to talk at least IP and TCP without external help.
Contiki (https://www.c64-wiki.com/wiki/Contiki) runs on a stock C64 (plus an Ethernet adapter) and implements a full TCP/IP stack. It has IRC, FTP, e-mail, a web browser, etc. No tricks -- it runs on the hardware with no external help.
I started out in the 90s with telnet, gopher, et al on a Mac IIci, and a 386 that had Win 3.10 and Trumpet winsock installed. Sun/SGI were user friendly-ish. I suppose there was bigger iron available, and a few home computers that tcpip was backported to. But they'd be harder to come by.
Pretty much anything with a serial port and a CPU should be able to get online, provided you have appropriate software.
Most computers built after 1980 should be able to do it with some tinkering. Pretty much anything built after 1990 should be fairly trivial to get online.
If you want something somewhat usable, then Lynx/Links running on whatever a modern Linux distro can boot on should suffice.
I used a modem to get online with my Amiga 600 (7 MHz 68000, 2 + 4 MB RAM) in the 90's. It was perfectly possible to use things like IRC, eMule and a WWW browser on it, but the modern web will be quite unusable with aMosaic...
one of the reasons i insist on http support, anything post-95 with a network card is barely a challenge to get online, and it,s nice to browse my own site from whatever device i want to use.
'Domesticated pigeon 1.0' was developed about 10,000 years ago and although none of the first run are still around, the model design has been pretty much the same since.
Not sure if this counts, but I wrote my first program in 1972, when I was 8 years old. On an old mechanical teletype, connected via an acoustically coupled modem to a mainframe in the other end of the city. I only saw the BASIC interpreter, but my father told that they were doing some calculations abroad, even in the US, where he could get cheaper night time when it was daytime in Finland.
Edit: Those remote jobs were most likely batch jobs, and I am not sure how they got the stuff over, may not have been over a network connection.
I remember some implementations of TCP/IP stack on ZX, but don't remember if it was just a plan or finished product and I think they wrote about lynx as a browser?
What amount of assistance are we talking? There are IP stacks for IBM PC with DOS and for C64. I have Ethernet for my 5150. I have a device that turns a Raspberry Pi into a peripheral for a Ti-99/4A which can provide an Internet connection to the TI machine. I have another device that uses an ESP2866 or so to get anything with a serial port onto wifi. I a DECMate III which is a PDP-8 class machine that can get on the web. I have a couple of Livingston Portmaster 2e access concentrators that can give dozens of systems IP access via SLIP, PPP, or bare terminal-to-IP access. My 286 with OS/2 works fine for graphical browsing, but anything approaching modern TLS ciphers are a performance nightmare.
At a minimum, you're looking at as old as the 68020 Macs and the 386 PCs. The PDP-10, PDP-11, Amiga 1000, the earliest Sun machines (68k, pre-Sparc), and similar age machines from the 1980s and early 1990s having a really reasonable amount of functionality with the right options, OS version, drivers, and software.
Dumb devices can also be controlled to some degree- power can be easily switched using smart plugs, and you can convert an Arduino to use its GPIOs to "press" buttons
53 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 118 ms ] threadSo, for example a PDP11 running 2.9BSD (e.g. a 11/70 from 1975) should suffice, but there are other machines of similar vintage that support IPv4. You can also try putting a virtual PDP11 on the net using the simh emulator (http://simh.trailing-edge.com) and 2.9BSD from TUHS (https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Distributions/UCB/2.9BSD/).
* https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/281818.Where_Wizards_Sta...
If you're allowed to use software that's later than your hardware, then you can write a stack for almost anything, so the idea of a machine "supporting IPv4" becomes kind of meaningless. You need 576 bytes of memory for a packet buffer, plus your program. Any mid-sixties mainframe, maybe even older.
If you do count the age of the software in deciding what's "supported", and you require that the TCP/IP stack run locally and communicate with modern computers without translation, then you'll have a hard limit at about 1980 or 1981, since the TCP and IPv4 protocols weren't defined until then, and there was therefore definitely no software.
You could allow using NCP as a "legitimate Internet precursor" to TCP/IP, but if you do that there's no real reason not to just allow serial terminals as "legitimate precursors" to NCP. So 1980 or 1981 seems like the limit for a "pure" system with its own software.
If you allow software newer than the hardware, but limit yourself to not writing that software, my guess is that the oldest thing would be a KA-10, which is a 1968 computer. RFC 801 says that as of 1981, there was a stack for TENEX, which you could run on a KA-10. You could at least do Telnet, maybe FTP. That's assuming you can find another old computer to gateway whatever ancient serial protocols it was using at the physical layer.
Thank you for the replies though, something to read up on.
Minimums range from Pentium 90 to a ten year old i3. RAM would be a large factor as well for modern.
https://oldvcr.blogspot.com/2020/11/fun-with-crypto-ancienne...
It should be possible to use older machines to browse the web but it stops being about the machine and starts being more about availability of TLS libraries and rendering engines. In theory an Amiga 1000 (1985) should be able to connect to the Internet and may be able to run AmiSSL and IBrowse with the right upgrades. It might need custom hardware though. I think there's some jiggery pokery that'll allow older Macs dating back to 85 or maybe 84 (I'd be surprised to see an original 128kb Mac but the late 84 512kb model should work) to browse the web without modern TLS.
Even so the 3.10 build I have isn't built against current AmiSSL so TLS sites fail. It is slower than say, Voyager Browser and much slower than IBrowse. Netsurf 3.6 is usable if you're patient on an 060/50. Performance is around what I'd expect from a Pentium 75-100 maybe?
Most of what I do is creative, a mix of Art, music, programming, writing. I've done things like covid data analysis, I've written the odd letter on there, some of my newsletter gets written on there. I also use it for things like Usenet, IRC, Telegram etc. There's also a lot of really good games for it. I've heard classic 68k Mac owners have similar experiences. Of course, some say the Amiga is also the fastest classic Mac[1].
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jph0gxzL3UI
However, at 64MB RAM, accessing the "modern web" would be extremely, painfully slow, at best. In fact, the memory-hunger of modern browsers renders older machines practically unusable faster these days than any other factor, at least that has been my experience.
But let's go really "modern", i.e. being able to access web applications without missing features, timeouts etc. Slower, maybe just one at a time, but what you do works.
That's surprisingly hard. I sometimes use TenFourFox, a browser for Power Macs, which is a bit of a mashup between older versions that were still supported and back-ported newer features. And that can run on a quad core G5. I'd say that still misses the mark, but might come close enough. With a G4, that would bring you to maybe 2002's tech.
But in the end, for a lot of modern stuff you're basically required to have an "Evergreen" browser or IE11. On Windows, that means Windows 7, which IIRC won't run on Pentium IVs and requires about 1 Ghz/1 Gig RAM. So 2005/2006's tech.
On Linux, you can go lower. There's still 32 bit Linux support for Firefox, so if you can get a recent enough distro on an old computer, it should work. A core solo definitely does, and I guess a souped up Pentium IV should work well enough, too. Beyond that, it's going to get interesting. Pentium II's should work and you can give them enough RAM to chug along with a recent OS. So that' about 1998/1999.
Beyond that, CPU speed and max RAM will result in some breakage.
a. 2gb of ram as my raspberry pi with 1gb ram cannot handle more than 4 tabs in chromium responsively.
b. ssd, connecting to SATA, it makes my 10-year-old thinkpad feels new.
c. enough cpu power to handle 2mb of js
d. hdmi connector
That limits the choices to computers not older than 15 years old, plus minus several years.
If you want something to run an IP stack, then a 286 running `ka9qnos` is about as small as can do hardly anything useful, probably. There might be a c64 IP stack but at that point its getting technicality again; how much access and function counts?
If you're looking for paranoid security in cheap hardware, 486 for absolute purists (runs linux handily, good luck with the graphics, matrox card ruled), and up to .. ppro? p3? or so if you're slightly less pure.
Or get Sparc 5 or alpha or etc "exotic" hardware of that era and have an extra layer of obscurity plus years of unpatched security holes in any software you can make run today.
It really depends on how much modern web you want to do. TLS is significant overhead on older machines. And javascript heavy sites can bring modern machines to a crawl.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2XLZ4Z8LpEE
in 1994 i had a 286, ka9q and uucp, to serve email and Usenet to a small number of users. No NICs, all serial. nonprofit IT budgets.
it sucked but im grateful still to those whose software made it possible.
Fortunately, I also had a 286, KA9Q -- [0], not [1] -- a KPC-3 TNC [2] [EDIT: Actually, it may have been an MFJ-1270 (?) at that time], a handheld 2m transceiver, and a ham radio license whose ink was still wet -- having first seen this combination demonstrated to me in 1992. It may not sound like much -- and it certainly wasn't -- but it was enough to get me connected to AMPRNet [3]!
Thanks to the technological wonders of 1200 baud, half-duplex packet radio -- with something that just barely passed for "collision detection") -- I was able to chat daily with other amateur radio operators all over the world, send and receive mail, and even download files. (Understand that this "1200 baud" was nowhere close to the speed of a 1200 baud modem on a phone line -- which I would have been grateful for at that point!).
It was also my introduction to TCP/IP. Nowadays, I'm a network engineer. No surprise there!
Interestingly, six or seven years ago, perhaps, I randomly ended up on a phone call -- out of the blue -- with Phil, KA9Q. I worked for an ISP at the time and can't remember what the call was about (something work-related, obviously) but the owner walked in, handed me a piece of paper with a name and phone number and asked me to call the guy to discuss $deity-knows-what. (I did, obviously, and of course I had to ask "Are you THE Phil Karn?". He was. I'm sure he would never remember that but I certainly do!)
A few months ago, KA9Q -- [1], not [0] -- created an HN account [4] and commented [5] on a thread (about the sale to Amazon of a /10 of 44/8) and I took the opportunity to thank him in a reply, even though I assumed he probably wouldn't see it.
(Somehow, ~25 years later, I still have 44.48.0.105 although it hasn't been "active" since I don't know when... maybe I'll resurrect it someday!)
--
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KA9Q
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Karn
[2]: https://kantronics.com/kpc-3/
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMPRNet
[4]: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=KA9Q
[5]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24758472
By this standard, I'm accessing the Internet using a flat-panel display.
If something isn't running its own TCP/IP stack, it isn't accessing the Internet.
> There might be a c64 IP stack but at that point its getting technicality again; how much access and function counts?
Being able to talk at least IP and TCP without external help.
> Being able to talk at least IP and TCP without external help.
Contiki (https://www.c64-wiki.com/wiki/Contiki) runs on a stock C64 (plus an Ethernet adapter) and implements a full TCP/IP stack. It has IRC, FTP, e-mail, a web browser, etc. No tricks -- it runs on the hardware with no external help.
Most computers built after 1980 should be able to do it with some tinkering. Pretty much anything built after 1990 should be fairly trivial to get online.
If you want something somewhat usable, then Lynx/Links running on whatever a modern Linux distro can boot on should suffice.
I used a modem to get online with my Amiga 600 (7 MHz 68000, 2 + 4 MB RAM) in the 90's. It was perfectly possible to use things like IRC, eMule and a WWW browser on it, but the modern web will be quite unusable with aMosaic...
With post-1995 hardware it's mostly a matter of installing a network card + driver, and possibly a TCP/IP stack and a browser, depending on the OS.
is too broad. A C64 with a modem can access IRC and BBS
> minimal modification/add-on
This is a bit broad too. Every modern "add-on" has more power most of the old computer they are attached on.
You could run a proxy on the add-on, that would shrink pictures, html and remove https.
Or even simpler. The add-on could do all the computation and just use the old hardware to show the result.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_Alto
Ethernet and the Alto both can from PARC.
[1]: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1149
Edit: Those remote jobs were most likely batch jobs, and I am not sure how they got the stuff over, may not have been over a network connection.
- https://github.com/ttalvitie/browservice
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23595430
At a minimum, you're looking at as old as the 68020 Macs and the 386 PCs. The PDP-10, PDP-11, Amiga 1000, the earliest Sun machines (68k, pre-Sparc), and similar age machines from the 1980s and early 1990s having a really reasonable amount of functionality with the right options, OS version, drivers, and software.