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Show HN: MacProxy Plus – Surf the Modern Web on Vintage Computers

(github.com)
69 points hunterirving | 6 comments | 15 Oct 24 12:39 UTC | HN request time: 0.411s | source | bottom

I created an enhanced fork of the popular MacProxy project called MacProxy Plus, which makes it possible to browse the modern web on vintage hardware. You run MPP on a machine on your local network and configure the Mac (or other vintage computer) to use it as a proxy server. MPP converts HTTPS to HTTP, strips out CSS, JavaScript, and other tags the Mac's browser doesn't recognize, then serves super-simplified HTML that actually loads pretty fast on the nearly 40 year old machine. Custom handling is enabled by "extensions" (individual python scripts) which intercept requests for given domains (like chatgpt.com) and return simple HTML interfaces. Current extensions include Weather, ChatGPT, Anthropic Claude, Wikipedia, Reddit, Hackaday, WayBack Machine, Web Simulator, and (not) YouTube. Though this solution was developed with early Macs in mind, it should also work to get many other vintage computers online.
1. ralphc ◴[15 Oct 24 18:33 UTC] No.41851641[source]▶
How do you configure System 6 or 7 to use a proxy?
replies(5): >>41851725 #>>41852008 #>>41852148 #>>41853409 #>>41853907 #
2. nemo ◴[15 Oct 24 18:41 UTC] No.41851725[source]▶
It's been a while, but from what I recall with early Macs apps like mail clients and browsers would have their own proxy settings rather than any system-wide setting, so you'd set the proxy in Netscape (or whatever).
3. hunterirving ◴[15 Oct 24 19:06 UTC] No.41852008[source]▶
The browser I'm using (MacWeb 2.0) has its own proxy config (you can see it in the demonstration video around 3:27), but you can also enable a proxy at the system level using Internet Config (click Firewalls, check "Use HTTP Proxy", then enter the server address and port in the text field).
4. ◴[15 Oct 24 19:22 UTC] No.41852148[source]▶
5. johnklos ◴[15 Oct 24 21:41 UTC] No.41853409[source]▶
There are ways to do this transparently if you control the machine doing NAT for the classic computer. Doing things that way used to be more common before https became the default for most sites, because nowadays you'd have to install TLS certificates on each client to not constantly get errors. However, if you're also proxying https to http, then no worries!

I should update my transparent proxy how-to to be used with MacProxy Plus...

6. numpad0 ◴[15 Oct 24 22:47 UTC] No.41853907[source]▶
Most Classic Macs didn't have an RJ45 jack(for Ethernet) in the first place. Proxy config menus were a lot more common and accessible back then as well.