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Comment by roygbiv2 | Hacker News Reader

This landed at exactly the right time for me. I've just pulled out my 7100/66av power pc from the cupboard to play with. It lacks any modern browser (and probably the power to deal with https) so I resorted to hosting simple http server on my modern computer and downloading things I wanted to there and then going to the mac to download it again.

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> It lacks any modern browser (and probably the power to deal with https)

It should be able to run Netscape 4, but HTTPS will indeed be an issue - less because of speed, more because a browser that old will lack support for modern cipher suites.

I fixed that

https://bbenchoff.github.io/pages/MacSSL.html

There's a modern Lynx build for Classic Mac.

Also: gopher://magical.fish has tons of services, among gopher://sdf.org for phlogs and gopher://bitreich.org/1/lawn for a big directory.

And, by connecting to the public servers of http://bitlbee.org with any IRC client you can access modern IRC+TLS servers and a good chunk of protocols too (Discord, Mastodon, Steam, Jabber, Linc, Facebook chat, Telegram....)

If you mean the updated MacLynx I've been working on, I don't have TLS in it yet, but now that the PowerPC version is back I'm planning to embed Crypto Ancienne in it for opportunistic TLS 1.3 (unfortunately too much for anything less than a high end 68040).

https://oldvcr.blogspot.com/2025/04/maclynx-beta-6-back-to-p...

A stock Amiga 3000 with a 25 MHz m68030 can browse modern sites using modern SSL [0] without much fuss. Granted, some m68k optimizations have been done, but if an '030 can do it, an '040 can, and a PowerPC 601 absolutely can.

[0] https://www.ibrowse-dev.net/amissl/

Also be sure to check out FrogFind!

http://frogfind.com

Currently returning server error.

If it helps, Macintosh Garden has a FTP server, but everything is un-organized in one of 2 folders, apps and games. Too slow to get a directory listing on these older systems but you can get a file directly if you know what you’re looking for.

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