Comment by news_to_me | Hacker News Reader

Comment by news_to_me | Hacker News Reader

I got Netscape 1.12 working on an old Macintosh, and while it can't browse much by default, this[0] HTTP proxy makes the 'net much more accessible. I'm kind of surprised that proxies were supported so early in browsers, does anyone know why?

Also, if you happen to design a website with Netscape 1 compatibility, and you want to replace SVG images with GIFs only for Netscape, you can use the <object> tag like this:

    <object class="banner" type="image/svg+xml" data="assets/banner.svg" role="img" width="487" height="180" style="pointer-events:none">
      <center>
        <img src="assets/banner.gif" width="244" height="90" />
      </center>
    </object>

[0]: https://github.com/rdmark/macproxy

Network Address Translation was invented the same year that Netscape Navigator was originally released, and it took years for it to become the de facto way to get a private local network onto the Internet. In the 90s I installed proxy servers at several small businesses in order to share a dialup connection to other PCs in the network.

> In the 90s I installed proxy servers at several small businesses in order to share a dialup connection to other PCs in the network.

If your customer was cheap and needed more bandwidth you could use EQL[0] to load-balance a PPP connection over multiple POTS/ISDN lines if your ISP supported multiple connections. I set this up for a number of businesses back then when office staff started arguing with each over who was using all the bandwidth from a single 28K modem.

[0]https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/networking/eql.txt

Proxies — For Performance, I.e. local mirrors, security, private IP range in a corporate network, etc.

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