[rescue] revived: TiBook G4 867 (DVI)/ 1GB and MacOS9

[Chris Hanson]

On Apr 9, 2018, at 10:28 PM, Patrick Giagnocavo <patrick at zill.net> wrote:
>
> Anyone else doing anything with old Macs?

One of the things Ibve been doing with older Macsband with emulation of
older Macsbis to occasionally hack on things that can help connect Macs
running the classic System Software to the modern era.

For example, several years ago, getting SSL working meant going through the
hell of building OpenSSL. Nowadays therebs ARMbs mbedTLS project, which
compiles very quickly on a G4 under CodeWarrior on Mac OS 9 and which could
easily be built for System 7 as well, thanks to its modularity and isolation
of POSIX dependencies.

The same is true for libssh2; itbs not entirely isolated from POSIX
dependencies yet, but I have a set of patches that can finish isolating it[1],
and it also builds really quickly and compactly on Mac OS 9. If it were wired
into MacSSH or NiftyTelnet, you could use anything from a Mac Plus (if you
have quite a bit of patience during key exchange) to a dual-G4 to connect to a
modern system via SSH.

Even libcurl fits the same pattern; it supports mbedTLS now, it can also be
isolated from POSIX dependencies, and it can then be leveraged to implement a
full HTTP/HTTPS stack that can run on pretty much anything, letting you build
other software on top of that.

A few years ago I tried to do something similar on SunOS 4.1.4 or Solaris
2.5.1 and it was nigh-impossible to bootstrap all of this. The big change
between then and now has been that a lot of the embedded world has been
adopting these protocols (as part of the push towards b
Internet of
Thingsb
) and thus therebs been the necessary sponsorship of the work to
make these things run on smaller devices without a full POSIX-style OS
underneath, which turns out to also make them very usable for retrocomputing.

One downside to what Ibve been doing is that I need to jump through some
bureaucratic hoops to release anything I do. However, thatbs actually
feasible now, and if I can ever get this stuff in sufficient shape to release,
I can start that process.

  -- Chris