40 Year-old Apple Mac finally gets online thanks to a Raspberry Pi Pico W and some clever coding
Vintage hardware holds a special place in many tinkerers’ hearts, and maker Hunter Irving’s latest project brings an old 1986 Macintosh Plus back to life in a modern way—by getting it online using a Raspberry Pi Pico W. Irving’s ingenuity lies in emulating an old Ethernet adapter with the Pico W, tricking the Macintosh Plus into thinking it’s connected via legacy hardware. A key tool in this process is BlueSCSI, an open-source system designed to provide vintage machines with a SCSI disk solution. With BlueSCSI, the Pico W’s Wi-Fi serves as a bridge to the internet, making it an essential tool for retro enthusiasts.
Irving’s journey started with a thrift store find—the Macintosh Plus—and evolved into a fascinating project to reconnect this piece of computing history to the web. BlueSCSI enables the machine to handle basic HTML, but vintage computers like the Mac Plus often face challenges with modern web protocols like CSS and JavaScript. To address this, Irving developed a customized version of MacProxy, aptly named MacProxy Plus, which helps strip websites down to their essentials. This tailored solution allows the Macintosh Plus to display key information from sites like the National Weather Service, Wikipedia, and even ChatGPT, albeit with limitations.
The project doesn’t stop at browsing. Irving also pushed the boundaries by enabling the Mac Plus to “stream” YouTube videos, though at an incredibly slow rate—taking 17 hours to load a classic “Rickroll” via a local device. This retro setup highlights the charm of old-school computing and the creative ways modern tech like Raspberry Pi can breathe new life into vintage machines. Irving’s work is a testament to the enduring appeal of these classic devices, blending nostalgia with the excitement of modern tinkering.
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