Retrocomputing
FrogFind and 68k News
Building Modern Web Portals for Vintage Machines
<p>This talk will cover the creation of two web portals, which use open source libraries to make much of the modern web accessible to vintage machines and old web browsers. By using the Readability library, along with some haphazard PHP, I was able to take modern sites down to text content and HTML 1.1 on the server side. FrogFind.com serves as a web portal for limited browsers, such as old versions of Mosiac, or even text browsers like Contiki's on an Apple ][, to make much of the web's content accessible to them in a perfectly readable way.</p>
It is often said that the modern internet has left vintage computers behind. However, it is not the internet - it is the complexity of content. One way of bringing vintage machines to the modern web is through upgrades and accelerators. This creates a moving target of machines that will still age-out of sufficient upgrade-ability as the web continues to evolve. Another option is to deconstruct the modern web to make it accessible to vintage computers.
Using an open source library called Readability and some haphazard PHP, I've built two web portals: 68k.news and FrogFind.com. These sites allow vintage machine to view many websites as text-only, by stripping out complicated HTML and scripts and delivering HTML 1.1 content to old browsers, with images optional.
This talk will cover the idea behind these portals, their use, and just how usable and pleasant a vintage machine can become for daily internet content consumption without the distractions of the modern web.
Additional information
| Type | devroom |
|---|
More sessions
| 2/5/22 |
<p>A brief introduction to our devroom and the schedule ahead.</p>
|
| 2/5/22 |
<p>In 1982, David Horne wrote a version of chess which managed to fit inside the memory of a 1K ZX81. Although it wasn't a complete implementation, it was impressive enough to be remembered now, almost 40 years later. But running it in 2022 requires at least an emulator, ROM file, and the .P file, which limits the appeal to retro enthusiasts and excludes the intended audience - chess players!</p> <p>So, I modified the EMF emulator (and the game) to run as an emulator-as-a-service, so that it can ...
|
| 2/5/22 |
<p>The 'serial port,' usually carrying RS-232, has once been the window to the world on capable systems. This talk is a brief history on it, its use cases and its current state. Is it still relevant? Do we still love it? Are there alternatives?</p>
|
| 2/5/22 |
<p>Operating system of Apple-1 written by Steve Wozniak is an engineering piece of art – 256 bytes only! We will explain how it works using the original 6502 assembler source code along with our own rewritten in Python version so every software engineer could understand how It works. It should be useful for engineers who want to know basics of operating systems.</p>
|
| 2/5/22 |
<p>The HomeComputerMuseum is founded in 2018 after its initial plan in 2016. The idea of an interactive computer museum while being a social company and fully independent of subsidy. In 2020, right after a move to a bigger and more permanent location, the unsubsidized museum had to deal with corona. Against all odds, the museum survived and even grew faster than ever before, becoming world's largest museum on social media and collaborating with museums all over the world. This all with a social ...
|
| 2/5/22 |
<p>The history of calculation, information processing and computation is very rich. It is driving the industrial revolution and digital transformation of our world. This history is composed of many events related to conceptual and technological breakthroughs. In order to help in the analysis (by researchers) and explanation (to citizens), the NAM-IP Computer Museum is actively developing the "Trajectware" Open Source framework based on a the structuration of illustrated events in the form of ...
|
| 2/5/22 |
<p>The lecture will discuss reverse engineering e-waste. It will shortly present the open source hardware tools that are used internally at Unbinare and how these are used when the aim is to reduce e-waste.</p>
|
