First post, by Hamby
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One of my obsessions is connecting vintage computers to the internet.
I really wanted to "update" Arachne for DOS and browsers for other vintage computers (C64, Amiga, Atari, MacOS, etc... especially the upcoming Commander X16...)
The HTTPS protocol and SSL have made this almost impossible now. The calculations necessary would overwhelm older CPUs.
I don't know much about ardunio, but I came across one that was fully internet capable; not only wifi but also certificates and SSL support.
Another version of this also had a UART.
So I became curious as to whether I could turn such an arduino into an internet processing unit... think the equivalent of a GPU.
Sure, it might be more powerful than the computers I'd be connecting it to... but the point isn't just accessing the internet; it accessing it via vintage machines. And many times GPUs have been more powerful than the CPU they served.
So, I've been thinking of connecting a Max232 to the UART of the arduino, then connect that to the serial port of the PC in question... then (somehow) have the arduino make the encrypted connection, and then feed the HTML to the client computer... maybe massaging it first to eliminate impossible directives.
There's a version of Netsurf that works with a framebuffer, and I recall coming across some piece of software that does something similar to this using a modern computer for the translation.
Even if custom browsers had to be written to accommodate it, I'd still love to be able to access the internet on my vintage machines, and hopefully without Giggle et al scraping my data from it.