FrogFind: Search Engine for Vintage Computers | Hacker News Reader

FrogFind: Search Engine for Vintage Computers

frogfind.com

If you set your HTTP proxy to theoldnet.com (and add an exception for web.archive.org), and then set the port number to a year (try 1997, for example), you will get web pages served from the Wayback Machine, from that year.

It's like sending your entire browser back in time.

This is an amazing user interface/concept. What a unique way to use the combination of tools we have.

I only wish it was a bit more accessible for the layman -- maybe some sort of client side tiny application that set your http_proxy? or actually maybe a browser addon would work.

"The layman" can simply visit http://theoldnet.com and do it in the browser.

It's not quite as slick but it's functional.

The companion site is http://68k.news/ which renders news articles using a similar pipeline.

Any idea how to contact Action Retro, the developer?

EDIT: I found it in the FAQ.

It's cool that it loads every page through a proxy that strips out most of the extraneous nonsense. I was expecting the search results page to be "vintage" appropriate, but then every subsequent page to just be normal.

That said, I don't know that I'd call any computer running a web browser "vintage".

TRS-80 Model 100 → Telnet to a MacBook → Lynx to the web.

Surfing the web at 600 baud. That's how we roll all up in here.

lol. i was doing the same thing except it was a linux middlebox.

and if you've found any pages that render decently in lynx, you can add them to bobcat:

https://ohmeadhbh.github.io/bobcat/

I tried to do the same with my TRS-80 CoCo, but couldn't log in because the CoCo can't do lowercase letters. One of these days I should make an all-caps user with a couple of command aliases and try again. The same setup works well with my WYSE dumb terminal and Macintosh Classic, though the Classic should be able to handle some graphical browsing as well.

Contiki on an Apple II is not vintage for you?

I'm able to browse many traditionl http sites with my 8088 with 640k RAM

I'm gonna be completely honest with you; it wasn't until after I punched "ibm 5100" into the box and hit search that I realized this isn't a marketplace for finding classic computing devices.

I want someone to make that search engine!

Don't feel bad, I did the same.

This is cool! It’s amazing how heavy most web pages are - all while producing very little additional value to the web site visitor for that added complexity.

I was just namedropping this project in another thread today. Cool to see it on the front page too!

How do I easily add this to the list of search engines in Firefox? I seem trip over this issue every time I see one of these new search engines, and I definitely want to add it to the list of search engines. Maybe my distro broke this, again.

right click in a search box then Add a keyword for this search. Press tab 3 times and type "frog" or "f" or whatever you like. Use the address bar to FrogFind things by typing "frog hacker news"

It doesn't work. ugh, I think my distro tore that feature out of Firefox with the latest update.

I may only search eBay, Bing, Amazon, and other search engines that my distro deems worthy.

That was painful.

https://mycroftproject.com/search-engines.html?name=frogfind...

Hi, my understanding is that with very few exceptions, if a search engine is included in Firefox it is because Mozilla and the search engine have a contract and Mozilla makes some money from the arrangement. It's hard for outsiders to know what will be added or removed in the future.

https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/discussions/bring-back-recent...

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/extensions/category...

is what firefox points me to if I click on find more search engines from the settings

I started using one called Context Search[0] which let me set custom URLs to be searched on right-click. I needed something to search selected text on an intranet php search page, seems to work okay so far.

[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/contextual-se...

I just read up a bit. What a weird development. I normally resort to user scripts and bookmarklets to transport the search query between pages. Didn't know things got this bad.

Clicking on an open search js link[0] also doesn't seem to work anymore.

I've added auto discovery[1] here which seems to work. FrogFind should add this bloat to their pages :)

[0] - javascript:window.external.AddSearchProvider('http://blog.go-here.nl/yacy-opensearch.xml');

[1] - http://blog.go-here.nl/8603

Add-ons let you add other search engines. I suspect you could do it yourself pretty easily, maybe even as a custom pref.

Sadly searching HP stuff still returns whatever modern tech they’ve reused old product names on.

I was disappointed to discover this isn't a search engine to FIND vintage computers.

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