Ask HN: Oldest piece of hardware a user could access the internet with?
If a minimal modification/add-on could permit an even older device, please include.
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/).
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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].
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.
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_Alto
Ethernet and the Alto both can from PARC.
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.