68kMLA Classic Interface
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| macintosh.world - New Website for Old Macs | |
| Posted by: rnb on 2026-05-29 10:56:48 Hey everyone! Thought I'd unleash something I've been both working on and using for a while! Introducing macintosh.world: a website meant to be an interactive "home" page for your vintage computers that also works just fine on a modern one. This project stemmed from replacing the hard drive on my PowerBook 180 (and later 170) with a wifi-enabled BlueSCSI, there were a few websites available but I still didn't really feel like I was "connected" to the outside world. Here are a few features! If you want, please try it out and let me know what works/doesn't work/sucks or if there's anything you think would be cool to add! I made this for myself but I would be stoked if others found it useful! Credentials  If you want to use some of the interactive features, you can sign up for an account. Note that this isn't a secure website so please don't reuse a password from another service or website. After signing up, you have access to edit your: Profile  Your profile displays some info about you, images you've uploaded, and bulletins you've posted. If you are logged in as yourself, you can update any of this as well as your password. All of this can be done (and was done in my case) on internet-connected vintage machines. To interact with others, you can: Chat/Direct Message    This part is a little wonky and I'm open to any suggestions on how to make it a better experience! Live chat between a PowerBook from 1992 and an iPhone from 2026 is cool (in my opinion)! In an attempt to improve this, I created a: Client You can download this from the home page. It should download a .sit file that automatically extracts if you have StuffIt. It's compiled in THINK C and I have no idea how this will scale if and when more people use it so let me know what kind of bombs you get! The main benefit is that new messages show up automatically without the need to refresh the page.  Anyway, some more stuff you can do if you have a profile: Bulletins  Post a thought or something! Clippings  Save something for later so it doesn't get lost in the ether! Notes  Write a private (or as private as a site designed for the 90s can be) note to yourself! QuickTake  Upload an image and/or like and comment on others! Here's a picture of my dog I took on my QuickTake 150, tried my best to remove the background in PhotoFlash, and uploaded right from my PowerBook 180! Account-less Features Today  This is meant to be somewhat of a home page, it shows a whole bunch of stuff from around the internet as well as user uploads (Bulletins and QuickTakes). There's a lot going on the background so this is probably the slowest page on the website. The weather is selfishly defaulted to my location but can easily be changed. For more news, there's an entire page dedicated to it (click on the link to the right of "Today"). Books  Read an old book! You're at the mercy of Project Gutenberg's service so it may be somewhat slow to load initially. Recipes  While there are no instructions on baking your tunneled screen, this one actually ended up being more useful than I expected. Recipe websites are notorious for their meandering paragraphs and enough ads to bring my modern computer to its knees. Having something this concise for some of the standards has been nice. YouTube  Ok this one was kind of a dud, not sure if there's any more text based stuff I can extract but you can see a thumbnail I guess! Translate  This one needs some work but sometimes provides the right translation! Wiki  Nothing that other services didn't provide but included to keep everything in one place. Browse   Same with this, but you can save it for later! Maps  MapQuest is alive and well. Reference  Some more things.   This is probably the section I use the most, it's basically a full read-only Reddit experience. Images are downscaled to load faster on old hardware. You could just go to reddit.macintosh.world to access it directly if you wanted, like with some of the other pages mentioned. Ok I think that's everything. Like I said, I've been using it pretty heavily on my 170/180 with Netscape. I'd love to hear what machines/browsers you use it on and what works and doesn't! It would be cool if somebody else found this as useful as I have, browsing Reddit on a PowerBook 180 on my couch doesn't get old! | |
| Posted by: kaleokeanu on 2026-05-31 03:04:58 Looks fun. Tried it on my SE/30 but the program window is waaay oversized for the internal video and couldn't figure out how to scale it. MacWeb 2.0c+ stuck me in a redirect loop. Netscape 2.02 worked. System 7.5.5 | |
Posted by: rnb on 2026-05-31 10:33:36Looks fun. Tried it on my SE/30 but the program window is waaay oversized for the internal video and couldn't figure out how to scale it. Thank you for checking it out! I fixed the redirect loop in MacWeb, this browser seems to handle websites quite a bit differently so I'm going through everything else to make sure it's working properly. Chat and image uploads are unsurprisingly the biggest hurdles. Scaling the client can be done if you click here - is that what was oversized for you? Or was it the website itself?  Client definitely needs some work and should probably default to something smaller. I'm also working on an icon set for it in ResEdit so it doesn't have the generic application icon. | |
Posted by: Phipli on 2026-05-31 10:48:04Scaling the client can be done if you click here - is that what was oversized for you? Or was it the website itself?I imagine if the default size is too large for the compact Mac screen, they won't be able to click on that. | |
Posted by: rnb on 2026-05-31 11:14:00I imagine if the default size is too large for the compact Mac screen, they won't be able to click on that. True - if that part is off the screen that wouldn't work. I'm also interested in how much sidescrolling happens on compact Macs in the browser, it's fine on a PowerBook 180 but there's a little more real estate there. I can't stand sidescrolling so I'd want to fix it if there is. | |
| Posted by: kaleokeanu on 2026-05-31 11:14:57 Ya I tried dragging until I could see it but the window is too tall. I have a radius tpd I could put in so I could drag it to the second monitor… | |
| Posted by: nathall on 2026-06-12 19:59:21 Interesting... Loads fine and quick on my SE/16 under MacWeb, but there’s no formatting in the news feed...  Also, I really wanted to read about the flesh-eating screw worm infestation in south Texas, but clicking on news links just took me to a blank search page...  | |
Posted by: rnb on 2026-06-13 04:53:56Interesting... Loads fine and quick on my SE/16 under MacWeb, but there’s no formatting in the news feed... Thanks for taking a look! I’ll check this out soon and let you know when it’s fixed. Still learning how MacWeb treats pages versus Netscape on these old machines. My goal is to have all of this “just work” no matter what browser is used. I haven’t had a chance to scale down the client yet but it’s on my short list. | |
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