Hacker News Reader

Comment by trimbo | Hacker News Reader

> I attempted to use Netscape Navigator and iCab based on the list from here to no avail, Netscape Navigator crashed and iCab reported that it didn't have enough memory

Well the SE is like 1986 technology that predates the web. NCSA Mosaic came out in 1993.

I can't find the min spec for Mac Mosaic 1.x other than "System 7" but you could give it a try. Even Mosaic would have been mostly targeting Macs in wide deployment at the time. Those would be more like Mac II, Centris and Quadra machines with 68030s or 68040s with more RAM and built-in HDDs.

Fun project!

View on HN

Thanks for the advice. I found a copy of NCSA Mosaic 1.0.3 and it works on the Macintosh SE running System 7! The next version, Mosaic 2.0.1, needs 5MB of free memory. Mosaic does a better job handling larger pages like this blog post, and even chews through the inline SVG diagrams and renders just the text.

My only complaint is that Mosaic uses the serif default font we're all used to, instead of the sans-serif default used by MacWeb, which makes it a little harder to read at such a low resolution.

Added a section on it to the bottom of the article :)

I had a Mac LC with 4MB of RAM when I was a kid. It ran System 7 and was slightly too underpowered to run a web browser. I think you needed at least 6 MB to get Netscape 1.0 to run. Even if you did get it to run it would be painfully slow, especially if you're connected via a 14.4 modem as was common at the time. Loading a single image could take a full minute or more.

Rule of thumb for Z-Modem transfers on a 14.4 modem was 100kB of data per minute.

14 minutes for an entire diskette’s content was magically fast, for the brief window of 14.4’s relevance.

“Time to download your storage” is an interesting metric, and it certainly takes longer to fill a terabyte drive from a 1gb/s connection that filling floppies with a modem.

I'm trying to recall how I did this - maybe RAM disk? Wasn't much of a concern at first, as you could run something like lynx in your dial up terminal and there weren't many images on those early web sites.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com