Browsing the Web on a Vintage Apple //e with Contiki!

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What's the web browsing experience like on a 38 year old Apple IIe? Well, with a bit of modern software and hardware, you might be surprised. Let's explore the Uthernet ][ card, the Contiki OS, and browse the web like it's a retro-future sci-fi version of 1985.
🍎 6502 Contiki port on Github: github.com/oliverschmidt/contiki
🍎 a2retrosystems downloads: www.a2retrosystems.com/Contiki...
🍎 FrogFind, the search engine that let's you browse the internet on vintage computers: frogfind.com
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💾 For more vintage Apple stuff, please subscribe: kzbin.info?s...
💾 Support these retro computing shenanigans on Patreon! / actionretro
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Check out my Amazon page with links to my tools, adapters, soldering equipment, camera gear and more: www.amazon.com/shop/actionretro
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💬 Come talk about old computers on the BitBang Social Mastodon! bitbang.social
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#appleii #contiki #vintage

[@ActionRetro]

Thanks Morning Brew for sponsoring this video, and for making the news enjoyable - sign up for free here: cen.yt/mbactionretro​

[@mxikxi]

First time ever I was listening to a sponsor ad, and actually subscribed to it. Thought it might help u to keep up the content.

[@ActionRetro]

@@mxikxi thank you!

[@julianrichards9509]

Could i suggest my dear sir,that "FIXING" a computer by replacing the power supply and motherboard,is actually called moving the problem into the landfill..nothing has been fixed.

[@Astinsan]

The appleii is actually the first rapberry pi. It has io pins. Seen robotics built with apple ii

[@RomaniaOverpowered]

AMAZING!

[@rileyhance318]

This is one of those channels you stumble across and now you have hours of binge watching ahead of you

[@paulmuaddib451]

Enjoy the Cursed Mac SE saga!

[@mikequinlan9585]

This is a great channel enjoy!

[@Friendo111]

Agreed, as long as you don't have Chirophobia. I'm working through it with the help of therapy.

[@KnuckleHunkybuck]

It reminds me of the weekend that I discovered the 8-Bit Guy.

[@timurtheterrible4062]

Literally what just happened to me :)

[@MarcoGPUtuber]

Computers ending up as ewaste is a national tragedy! Save the computers!

[@ActionRetro]

Indeed!

[@ActionRetro]

@@fadate7292 I wish that place was closer!

[@5ucur]

International, even!

[@TechRyze]

The millions of ‘unusable’ machines out there should at least be recycled thoroughly. Antiques should be preserved

[@spingleboygle]

i agree!! old doesn’t mean unusable!!!

[@wojiaobill]

"mooooom, I need an Apple II!" "for what, dear?" "to browse the Web with, duh!"

[@KnuckleHunkybuck]

Drake psh face: Best Buy Drake yeeeeah face: Goodwill

[@systemchris]

Frogfind is easily one of my favourite inventions of the last 10 years!

[@Defianthuman]

I think that it is amazing. Just like duck duck go

[@happyarch5365]

I've been using frogfind on my Wii so it can browse the web again! Granted the Wii isn't as old as the computers other people are using, it still is a roughly 15 year old powerpc computer.

[@pedrofelck]

Great idea, I think I'll take the dust of my Wii.

[@tomrow32]

I gotta try this on my 7th gen handhelds

[@badladyami]

I'm honestly surprised more folks haven't tried installing Mac System 7 or MacOS 8/9 on their Wii.

[@UpLateGeek]

I bet if you showed this to an Apple engineer in 1983, it would totally blow their mind! Not the whole logging onto a remote service part, modems and dial-up services were around in the 60s (home users started getting access to such services in the late 70s, and I'm pretty sure Apple had their own internal service for e-mail and such in the 80s), it's the complexity of the software and the depth of information it gives you access to that would flip their lid. We're talking about a time when the most complex thing a computer could do was to help you balance the household budget with a tiny, single workbook spreadsheet. The fact that you can boot a simple Disk Operating System (with mouse support!) from a floppy disk, twiddle a few settings, then have access to an endless feed of news and knowledge, or chat in real-time with dozens, hundreds, or possibly thousands of people across the world - that would've seemed like the amazing future that science fiction has promised for decades prior to the 80s! And in a way, it still kind-of blows my mind too!

[@Tiago-]

This is one of the coolest things I've ever seen. The internet through a green-monochrome display is a beautiful thing

[@A2-Retro]

It's great to see my work on Contiki (and my Telnet65 in another video) shown to such a broad audience. And thanks for creating FrogFind and 68K News!

[@merry-cat]

My 2018 mbp doesn't like mentions of the new Apple Silicon based ones. It's bad for it's confidence. I can't imagine what your beige box must be feeling

[@burp2019]

it'd be used to that by now

[@martindoherty377]

Minor point, but the card's name is not pronounced like "other-net" but like "ooth-er-net" (ooth as in tooth). It's a reference to King Uther Pendragon, father of King Arthur in British legend.

[@hstrinzel]

VERY impressive indeed for an Apple IIe. Good that we have 80-column screens instead of 40 columns. VERY GOOD WORK! I may try it myself some time. It seems to runs on an AppleWin Apple II Emulator, then I don't have to buy the Uthernet.

[@tammysilverwolf1085]

This is such a wild and cool application of technology. I've heard a lot about doctors in remote locations still using dial up BBS to share information, and I always thought that was pretty fantastic. This only adds to that level of awesome. Probably wouldn't want to use the modern internet on a dialup, even with Frogfind, but it still feels like it could be done. Great job. Thanks so much for sharing this. :)

[@lemonherb1]

Very nice system and review! BTW, you have an earlier unenhanced IIe here. ReactiveMicro sells the enhancement kit that includes the most recent ROMs, including the MouseText character set that would give you a proper mouse cursor, and the newer 65C02 CPU that should let you run all of the later 8-bit Apple II applications

[@jimb032]

Hush ..don't tell him that. He already stole that $1000 monitor for nothing...at least let him suffer with the unenhanced ][e!!!!

[@SuperAgentman007]

I remember back in 1984 that Apple IIs did have a dial up modem. I remember that because I used to use it it was slow as hell but it did work you used a telephone that you connected to a suction cup receiver, and you could go on connections that had programs on them.

[@AlsGeekLab]

Who gives this a thumbs down?! Honestly! Great video again, very thorough walk through. One of my first videos on YT was about using an Apple 2e on the web, great to see this one bring it all together!

[@achimboers]

In one word: awesome!! I actually have an Uthernet II card lying around, so this is my project for today. Thanks so much for Frogfind!!

[@Retrocatone]

Stumble accros this channel due to KZbin suggestions, great source of information and finish to push me into more Mac vintage shenanigans, as I’m already in retro computing. So thank you and keep up your instructive shenanigans

[@markhatch1267]

Just today discovered your channel. I have been wondering for several years, with the expansion of vintage/retro computing of every conceivable brand of computer, if people out there were really doing internet apps and sites for the old machines. It is cool to see that you have actually done it. Keep up the great work. Looking forward to discovering what else the vintage/retro community is doing out there.

[@JBrinx18]

Well, I can see quite a few other retro channels showing this off. Super cool

[@DavidStahlOLDHAPPyMACs]

Amazing That Is The Great Thing About The Apple Community We All Work Together To Kept The Older Vintage Tech Working In This Modern World Great Job Sean

[@qwave54]

That ADT Pro bootstrapping is pretty neat, I'll have to try it out

[@RikerJoe]

Awesome stuff, Sean!

[@kmitses]

Love it... And a philly local ... This is amazing ... Been using 68k.news on my old Compaq presario.. I'd love to see more retro sites put up ..as well as a return to instant messenger and icq... Those were the good ol days

[@eDoc2020]

I forgot to let you know after the earlier video, I tried FrogFind and 68k-news on my HP Palmtop with WWW/LX and ran into a few problems which I was able to diagnose. First, some of the links (and other HTML attributes) in your generated pages use a single tick around the URL instead of the standard quote mark. This should be easy to fix if you haven't already. Second, the browser can't handle long URLs so the article links can't be loaded. Working around this would probably require an integral URL shortener. Given enough time I could probably do this myself but I'm lazy. I don't know if there's a fork which has already done this. Oh, I almost forgot, thanks for creating it in the first place! Other than these two issues it's a great service.

[@mardus_ee]

One option is to either remove most of the useless URL parameters, or to replace them with the plain target URL, as DuckDuckGo would.

[@mjsteelewasabipunk6091]

This is amazing - thank you!

[@MrLurchsThings]

I have one of these for my IIgs and as of yesterday the IIgs actually works 😁 Although I have a Booti card in mine, but I’m pretty sure there is a Contiki 2mg or PO image kicking around.

[@CanadianComputerCollector]

Love this so much!

[@hc3d]

Great work

[@Kikay0n]

Super awesome dude!

[@MegaManNeo]

I have seen a video yesterday where someone uses his C64 with Contiki to browse the web. Sure it was a little slower while rendering the webpage but things actually work really well when there's just or mostly text. In fact, sometimes I still do that on modern machines if my Internet connection is really bad or if I need that retro feeling. Gives you a good feeling how the majority of a website these days is nothing but graphics and JS too. Neither of which necessary if all you want is reading news.

[@rgw_panda]

This is the coolest thing I've seen today.

[@marklechman2225]

Thanks! I’m going to visit your custom pages next time I get online with my Dreamcast!

[@dadecoza]

it would be cool if you can make a telnet version of frogfind so that vintage computers can use native terminal emulators with those cheapy serial/esp8266 modules without the need to run a full tcp stack on the machine. ie. a type of bbs to html gateway ...

[@eDoc2020]

You can telnet into a Linux (or UNIX) system and run a text-based web browser such as Lynx or Links.

[@therealgaragegirls]

One word: Amazing! 👍🏻

[@billchatfield3064]

Action Retro (a.k.a "The Hand") is the right hand of retro tech. I love frogfind and 68k.news! Thanks so much!

[@ColonialPuppet]

I’m definitely trying this on my Apple II

[@aaronbrown4275]

Got a good laugh. We had those monitors in the computer lab in my middle school. Those poor screens never got tilted with the tilt switch. *push* CREEK "STOP DOING THAT!", screamed the lab teacher. Good times.

[@ActionRetro]

😂

[@TheOldNet]

That's awesome! I didn't know there was a text based browser for the Apple II.

[@nzSkitzo]

Amazing!! This is so cool 😎

[@SpottedBullet]

Super neat!

[@Gamerbay2017]

I love it!

[@lanuhsislehswolfchild146]

That's so rad!

[@glorfification]

Very cool! I started out with an Apple 2 (in 1980), but I never used a modem with it, let alone an ethernet card.

[@xero110]

Hello from a former NJ resident viewer. Not a turnpike exit resident, but Sussex County.

[@FrankConforti]

Hey, I resent the “really old computer” comment at the end. I was 22 when I got my first Apple computer. From my perspective, the “internet” was late to the party. We still did great things back then with 300baud modems and BBSes. In fact, we were able to bring together 1000 members in our south Florida club back then. I don’t want to sound like some old grandpa but we were able to do some amazing stuff back then (think Guy Kawasaki at one of our meetings). I love the internet today but it doesn’t have the same impact for me as when we got on the ‘net “way back then”. Done now. I’ll use my walker to leave. (HA!) Keep up the good work.

[@AndreasKoepkeAU]

Thanks for providing such useful sites. I heard about Frog Find via Reddit and set it as the homepage for my 486 PC. It was this that brought me to your KZbin channel and I have subscribed. Just finished watching the cursed SE/30 playlist. Awesome work.

[@dylanwillyams]

i sold one of these 2e's with a color monitor 2 or 3 years ago. i Still have a mono chrome shoulda kept the color it was beautiful playing pacman on it.

[@paulwilliams4274]

@action retro would you consider adding captions to your videos?

[@shannonpalmer]

This really takes me back to my first days of the internet. I used an apple iie with the monochrome screen in a computer lab at my university, circa 1994 (it was the lab for the non-computer geeks, so we got the older computers at the time), and I mostly used it to read all the articles I could find about Smashing Pumpkins, lol. I just got a “new to me” apple iie yesterday and I’m pretty excited to be able to use it for things like this!

[@bilbo_gamers6417]

can't wait to see this done on a 60s era ibm mainframe

[@hattree]

This looks like what the first web i ever used dialed into a VAX when i was in college.

[@ruadeil_zabelin]

Fun fact about IRC, if you create a Twitch bot, it will use the IRC protocol to connect to the chat. I don't know if this is just twitch thinking its a good interface or if twitch perhaps uses irc internally for all its chat. I think that would make sense, since IRC servers are tried and tested for decades for handling loads of chat.

[@4kleidisc]

I have a feeling that an os as simple as this could be ported to scratch, a highly limited programming language. I will keep you updated

[@JamesnLollify]

Nice mate

[@mikehosken4328]

Gopher would be awesome to use with this

[@stampedetrail2003]

Oh that is so cool

[@sxymike12]

It's so weird seeing all these modern day events and sites popping up on that thing, seeing that is actually the same feeling you'd get back in the day seeing a computer do something you didn't know it could do.

[@stan0033x]

when he waves his hand like its like a cartoon comedy lol

[@happyatheists9361]

Thank steve and xerox for gui we don't have nightmare how to operating things

[@frankiii9165]

Man there's few information about this monitor, probably my favourite.

[@BryonLape]

IRC....one of the first Internet apps I started using in 1987.

[@bricklearns]

Image to text rendering would be really cool on frog find

[@FrankConforti]

Dude, I REALLY admire what you are doing here but not just for retro computing. There is a significant percentage of the earth’s population that not only have sub-par computational power but also terrible internet access. What you are demonstrating here is just how much INFORMATION can still be provided to humans living in parts of the world where the internet is a phone line and 300 baud (remember those days? I do.).

[@tim_allen_jr]

This is awesome you're doing a great service.🧠📈

[@CanDoo321]

Hello, good content!

[@GenericPast]

It's the Fallout world coming to life.

[@im_tem]

is it a good thing considering the events in fallout series?

[@scruffya4017]

one to try if i ever get a apple IIe again. (my last one was when i was 10 and i did not know what to do with it or where to get the programs to run on it.) memories these days i have a Macintosh lc new on the internet love frog find tho it would be nice if there was a list of 68k websites to visit

[@MichaelAStanhope]

Whats the spec on your IIe? Does it still sport the 64k or have you upgraded it? I know its "unenhanced" so thats a start :). Now you are making me want to get an uthernet card and pop it in something, maybe my II+ although with only 40 columns that might be a disaster!

[@qrr4y]

I have a 2e and I want to do this

[@user-dt8ik3wv9l]

Love it....😁👍

[@ToTheGAMES]

You might wanna blur out your own hostname in the IRC section.

[@mojoblues66]

And don't forget to wear a tin foil hat!

[@ChrisCookTech]

Dude this is amazing!

[@fenriswolf039]

Epic!

[@KnuckleHunkybuck]

I'm watching this video on my Apple ][ right now, and I would love to upgrade to an Apple //e.

[@paullee107]

When you made frogfind and 68k.news, those of us in the BBS world likes talking about and using it. There are some great text-only BBSes that you could telnet to, if that telnet disk allows telnetting out. I wish you’d do a BBs video - I run one, but in ANSI graphics... I’d you’d like to collaborate, or at least get info from me about all text BBSES, there is still a thriving BBS community in 2021. Love your videos, and would love to see you cover Bulletin Board Systems. Some of us still in Fidonet and Fidonet-like message & file networks. It’s right up your alley... or should be. Pick my brain for video research!!

[@ActionRetro]

I've been really getting into BBS's lately! What's yours?

[@TheMetalMag]

Amazing u rock

[@trentonhuggins465]

This is insane

[@steveforbes8287]

I always knew this was possible. Now, it's time to dig out all of my old APPLE II+and IIe computers and have some fun! I must have at least 15 of them plus all kinds of software, manuals, drives, monitors, hard drives and so on. Play time!

[@DickDawsonTheShills]

#FrogFind is amazing!

[@John-sb3ix]

Im a few days late but nice! Imma see if i can get my apple 2 online lol.

[@idahofur]

I was just going to do a terminal emulator on my apple II plus via linux and a serial cable. Then perhaps b*tchx and lynx. But for some reason. Most good terminal programs are for the IIe. But I'll get it one of these days.

[@2dfx]

Now you just need to get a Hotline Client for the Apple IIe and you're all set!

[@gigabytemmx]

I would love to see if it's possible to develop a website using that computer. Maybe that telnet disk could be of use to connect to a modern pc and write code that way I kinda want to try it, but I digress. Rather nice! Even if I'm 2 years late to the party

[@badladyami]

2:18 That's because accessibility was Woz's vision. Jobs wanted everything closed and seamless. Woz wanted everything buildable.

[@MrJackSeverity]

Thanks for this Sean! I wrote on your Discord a little while ago saying I have tried this out on my commodore 64 using Contiki. Although they look very similar for some reason after searching with frog find I cant click on any links eg apple ][e wiki. Its like the links arnt clickable. Not sure if anyone knows a fix but sing out if you do :) very impressive nonetheless

[@AlexValliMusic]

Old computers, the best ad blocker on the internet.

[@hzgl]

That ADTPro bootstrapping tool is quite the perfect example of forcing a terminal-based UI design on a graphics-capable UI XD

[@mateusfelipecota]

Almost all BBS boards uses telnet for connection, so is something that you could use for

[@OldAussieAds]

Apple // Forever!

[@valuemeter]

Looks like the Teletext experience on old TVs

[@juanschroder6519]

what happen with the umax supermac? please answer!

[@lattermanstudio]

Ran your two sites on my moldy oldie PowerBook 4G….. dang…. SUPER FAST pages!!!!……, ahhhhh brings me back to the old days when this computer was considered a top end high speed internet powerhouse 😃… back in the late 90’s I created super fast websites using GoLive Cyberstudio 🥳🥳🥳

[@jackcrawford304]

Tbh it’s actually not that slow loading news articles!

[@twiddler71]

I wonder if this would work with a rs232 serial wifi modem. I built one some time ago.

[@DevinDTV]

frogfind is useful even on modern systems if your bandwidth is low, like a weak mobile connection

[@TheSulross]

8-bit is all you need

[@livvy94]

I'm really curious if it'd be possible to get Gmail working in an environment like this. I'm using elinks on my headless raspberry pi (Thank you so so much for frogfind and 68k news!), and Gmail refuses to load.

[@neutrino78x]

Here's a question about contiki....if you download a file from the web, say with the wget program it has, will that be saved in a ProDOS compatible format, so you can load it with a text editor or file viewer from the 70s/80s? The ultimate evolution of this would be an IP stack integrated into ProDOS. Like with the original IBM PC 5150, you can put an ethernet card into it and you can run a IP stack such as WatTCP and it connects to the internet directly just like a modern PC. If we could get that on Apple //e it would be cool 🙂

[@TheHelloNeighborShow]

Can you see Images with frog find on the apple II?