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System 6 Browser Development Opinions

System 6 Browser Development Opinions Development 322 posts Aug 5, 2008 — Sep 2, 2010
And the crowd goes wild!

Woot! Major milestone in the testing department..
i. Built using THINK C 5.0

ii. System 6.0.8 on a 4Mb Macintosh Plus

iii. MacTCP 2.0.4 using MacIP over LocalTalk Bridge 2. 1 to a MacIP gateway

iv. Successfully downloaded and displayed a GIF file from an IRIX box using HTTP, "http://indy/outbox/images/sgi_banner.gif".
Super! You da man!

i honestly think it'd be easier to come up with a new protocol for forums
What about a proxy that turns the pages into html for primitive browsers?
there was a browser for newton that did that. it used a server to convert a site to be displayed properly on the newton then sent everything to the client.
What if there was a sever, that had like a special copy of Firefox running, that basically downloaded the entire page, rendered it at whatever resolution (512x384) or maybe at a larger resolution and then scaled it down. Then it takes and makes the image a big image map and makes all the links clickable, and then sends the image and the map as a super simple HTML page on a web server. You could use crappy old browser v1.0 that already exists to view a modern page.

Are there any OS routines for converting UTF-8 or ISO8859-1 to Mac Roman on System 6?

Are there any OS routines for converting UTF-8 or ISO8859-1 to Mac Roman on System 6?
I think System 6 predates Unicode by a good few years, if not most of a decade...

After a round trip including "Prog_With_TEC_Mgr_1.5.pdf" I found this interesting file which maps the Mac Roman charset to the Unicode equivalents. This means that as UTF-8 is actually a form of Unicode I can do the mapping from that.

The ISO-8859 would need similar mapping tables.

ftp://ftp.unicode.org/Public/MAPPINGS/VENDORS/APPLE/ROMAN.TXT

I think I've noticed a difference between System 6 and System 7 upwards WaitNextEvent.

With 7 and later, if you give it a timeout, it effectively ignores it if you are the front application and keeps giving you the null events.

With 6, if you tell it you'll wait for a minute, even if you are the front application it will not do anything for a minute unless there is an event, eg osEvt/mouseMovedMessage. Has anyone noticed this before?

So, what's the status on the project?

I'm working on the HTML rendering at the moment then we should have a read only browser.

I'm trying to abstract the rendering so it can use either temporary files or MultiFinder memory as available to make the actual working set of the program as small as possible, I want it to be useable while only taking up 384kb.

The TCP/IP, HTTP and GIF side are all working very well.

Test environment is in flux, my Mac Plus seems to have taken a turn for the worse (reboots for no apparent reason, possibly overheating), so have beeing using an LC-II, have now taken delivery of a Classic so will use that.

This is amazing. You didn't just moan about the lack of a web browser for such old machines like the rest of us do, you actually went out and wrote one.

My hat is off to you sir!

%$#^ this. Now I need a new reason to moan and groan. Maybe I can moan and groan about not having a reason to moan and groan about the lack of a web browser for an OS that I don't even use any more. }:)

Anyway, I'm sure that there are going to be a lot of happy people out there.

Just to keep this topic up top where it belongs...

Just to keep this topic up top where it belongs...
Patience, I have a day job as well. :)

It's like archeology, finding lot's of things that have been made so much simpler by System 7, working directories being an excellent example.

Porter, I'm astounded. This is by far the most impressive thing I've seen on this site.

porter - if you need test hardware and happen to be in Australia (long shot I know) send me a PM - I would be more than happy to donate.

porter - if you need test hardware and happen to be in Australia (long shot I know) send me a PM - I would be more than happy to donate.
No, thanks, I have everything thing I need.

Time would be a useful thing. :)

Time would be a useful thing. :)
Fresh out of that [:)] ]'>

Porter,

You, ma man-are living my dream, I´ve always wanted to do this-

I have so many things to say and am so excited i will have to go into list format or risk bursting.

1. Have you heard of the contiki project? a full multitasked,multithreaded gui os with a full suite of internet apps (yes this includes a browser) - The browser avoids chewing ram{ 64kb on a std c64} by downloading a frame or portion of a html page over a ethernet broadband conn.(yes the c64 has an ethernet cartrige!)

2.What r u gunna call this project?

3. Im only a tadpole learner - coder but if i can help with _A_N_Y_T_H_I_N_G_ please, I here to help - images , website, gophersite, research, support,betatesting ect

3.will it be/end up open source?

4.i see ur talking about stack/binary memory usage, does that mean it will be frugal enough to run on system 6.0.3 and a fatmac - mainly so a hd20 can be used?

5.also will it run off a 400/800k floppy or a ramdisk/hd?

6.do u have a blog on this subject? - I would _really_ like to learnof ur progress here.

7. Musings of my mind...... hmmm quickdraw,multifinder,macos - have u thought of a iigs port - or letting someone do it for u? (quickdraw,the manager,GSOS)

8 Cant wait to hear from you or progress- I have a Job and I also have time. ;-)

edit - spelled contiki,broadband wrong

Yes, I remember there used to be something like that for WAP phones. That;s where I got the idea
but the only bad thing about that is if the server goes down the browser is useless.
What if there is a service from a well know company such as google?

Might be able to use this: http://www.google.com/gwt/n and then do a secondary pass with the browser.

Hi,

I just joined your army, though knowing about this forum and searching stuff around for quite some time. Greetings from Switzerland!

I just wanted to say thank you guys for this topic, and especially porter for those great news! What you're doing is incredible, and so much fun! I have to say that getting online with a 68k Mac is mainly fun (but a lot of fun) for me…

I'm really looking forward to see and try this, and so are my System 6 Macs! :-)

Wow, thanks for the support guys! :)

( no, I'm not being sarcastic )

*Bump*

Any news?

*Bump*Any news?
Still in progress. Should have some time this weekend to do some work.

:D any news? sorry, im just so eager to hear of ur progress no matter how small and incremental. nb i dont wanna sound like a tape recorder but if u have expressive (hey even creative at this point) :) writing skills, a blog will shut me/us up. ;D
It's going well. Still wokring on the rendering stage. Parsing, comms and GIF graphics are solid now. Will only be monochrome, no intention to support color quickdraw.

Good effort!

It's going well. Still wokring on the rendering stage. Parsing, comms and GIF graphics are solid now. Will only be monochrome, no intention to support color quickdraw.
btw porter - i c by the way u spelt colour ur an aussie/kiwi/pom? if suggestions r still open - id love 2 c gopher and wap support. they r both incredibly lean on cpu and ram one is a glorified menu system and the other is designed to render on phones with less ram than a goldfish. + i'd love to build my gopher site on sys 6 testing with this new no name browser. - ever thought of the possibility of running a competitom to come up with a name 4 it? -only of course if u cant think of one.
*bump*

Yes, still working on it when I find the time.

mp.ls