In this post I muse about my vision for the future of internet access with vintage PCs.

5G wireless:

We can expect the 5th generation of wireless technology to, at minimum, take over the mobile data market.

Based on the ever-decreasing cost per bit of data transferred, or cost per kbps of speed, or however you want to define it (read: costs for internet access are continually decreasing just as they have for the last 30 years), perhaps in 10 or 20 years we will have cheap unlimited 5G data plans that everyone purchases for their internet, which ends up replacing cable and DSL connections for casual home users, and fiber optic for people who need hard-wired connections, with faster than gigabit speeds. Coverage might be as good or better than current 4G LTE systems. (note: this is not far-fetched. Given how much better our systems are today than they were 20 years ago, this seems like a fair assumption if things keep going in the same direction)

Now, perhaps we in the retro PC community might think about, at some point in the future when these systems begin to be implemented on a broad scale, figuring out ways to easily connect old PCs to these 5G networks. Perhaps even producing some community-designed hardware in order to achieve this end, and software to go along with it and provide whatever emulation layers might be necessary to make sure old software designed for old protocols still works. Perhaps PCMCIA and/or PCI 5G cards, with drivers that emulate a gigabit ethernet card. Obviously this would be a lot of work but conceivably doable in the future. Note that this would be especially useful for old laptops.

New internet standards:

Internet HTML/CSS/etc standards are changing at such a rapid pace that browsers are going to be at version 526789.057878 by the year 2025, or something. I exaggerate but my point is that things are hardly static in the Internet world.

There might be demand in the retro community for any of the following:

• A public proxy server that stays up to date with the latest standards and translates everything into HTML 2/3/4 without mangling formatting as much as possible, while also handling HTTPS and maybe also any IPv6 incompatibilities, also I am hearing about DNS over HTTPS which might be an issue that could also be solved in this manner.
• A new cross-platform browser that is updated on a regular basis and supports the latest HTML5/CSS/JS/etc standards, and is FAST enough to be run on old PCs. Maybe it even has some kind of "reduce bloat" algorithm to give you a smaller version of the website you're loading.
• Custom clients for services such as Spotify, Slack, Discord, Google Drive, even - if Apple eventually releases the API for it - iMessage. (these do depend a lot on the APIs for these services being open enough)
• New lightweight email client supporting the latest security protocols.
• Terminal server/client for old PC's supporting everything from Telnet to the latest SSH stuff.

And all of this done putting an emphasis on low resource usage, as it should be when developing for retro PCs.

(I have also thought about other programs that might be developed, such as word processing with support for new document formats, or at least a DOC/DOCX/ODF converter)

I think at least some if not many of these things could happen within the next 10 or 20 years.

Any thoughts or things to add?