My New (old) eMac
Original publishing date: some time in 2023
I have had an eMac in my possession for the better half of the past year - since about February. It was a gift from my grandmother, since she hadn't used the thing in well over five years and no longer had any need to go on the internet at all anymore. In this, she let me take it home with me with the expectation being that I would preserve anything on it that she wanted. Later, it turned out that she didn't actually want any of the files on the computer at all.
Previously, I had been using a thrifted Power Mac G3 as my primary writing computer, since it was a fun way to eliminate some of the distractions that serve to drag me out of the groove of writing. Much like the ethos of the Smolnet, I wanted my writing computer to be as simple and functional as possible. The iMac served me well for the year that I used it, and I still have it sitting under my desk if I ever find a reason to use it again. The restrictions that existed on it were honestly fun to work around - for example, the machine didn't have any USB ports at all, so I had to find a keyboard and mouse that would work with the thing. I ended up with one of Apple's last ADB-compatible rubber dome boards, which wasn't anything special but was so plain that it helped me zone into the writing spirit.
My eMac is an interesting beast - the lack of restrictions in its I/O have honestly made it less interesting. Where's the fun in finishing a draft of a story and copying it onto a thumb drive? I do miss having to write to a floppy disk just to keep a record of anything. The novelty of the display still hasn't worn off, though. I do like messing around with the programs that have come pre-installed, MacOSX pre-flattification is still my favorite looking GUI, and being able to mess around with period-accurate applications to match is just as fun. I love the final version of Internet Exlorer for Mac in all it's green-blue glory, and I love the ancient version of Firefox that I keep in the launcher bar despite it being basically unusable, just to be able to look at the icon sometimes.
Thankfully my workload on this machine is incredibly light - the most I've done on it up to this week has just been writing in Microsoft Word, so I haven't felt any of the constraints or hangups one might expect from using something this old. It's deadly quiet too, save for the soft humming of the single fan keeping the machine cool and breezy and making my room smell like woodsmoke.
I'm realizing as I'm working on this that I've fallen into writing about tech, much like I'm sure plenty of people here do all the time. Oops! I promise the next thing I write about will be more interesting than this. Maybe.
Finding out about the Smolnet piqued my interest as of late. Nobody told me there was an entire second internet of tiny sites run by single people with absolutely nothing but text and links and sometimes some images! Who would have guessed! I tried to ask about it in the one group that I thought might have heard of it before and they said that I shouldn't talk about cryptocurrency - thus, I found out that searching "gemini" with no other info would bring you to a crypto NFT trading platform. Great. This smolnet thing seemed, in the moment, to be the perfect place to try and browse on my eMac. A small slice of the early-early-early-prehistoric internet, easily accessible with the right software, or at least a browser that can reach the web portal. How hard could it be?
Hard.
It turned out that the only way to connect my eMac to the outsied world was through the ethernet connector, which is trapped with a primitive dial-up modem interface in software. Great! What was I to do? Well, it turns out that there is another way to get it online - daisy chaining. That's right, with the power of an ethernet cable, a USB-C adapter and a couple settings changes, I can plug my beast of an all-in-one into my laptop and get it online. Thus, I was able to connect to the internet on an almost 20 year old device with a processor architechture so outdated that it could run almost nothing new.
But you know what it could run? The gemini web portal.
Yes! For some reason which I cannot parse, the Smolnet Web Portal only uses basic http for its security, meaning that Internet Explorer for Mac version 5.2 could load the site flawlessly in under five seconds. I was FLOORED to see the thing load at all, let alone be usable. I cannot tell you the joy that ran through my entire body when I figured out how easy this was. Hours flew by as I read through dozens upon dozens of gemlogs and posts that were suddenly accessible to me without any issue. Sure, there were some sites that baulked at my connection (and rightly so) but they were few and far between. It was enthralling to the point that the afternoon I spent tinkering with everything convinced me to open up my own Gemlog, to set up my own tiny spot in the great expance of the net.
One small problem: How? Well, that was a hard question to answer. I'm frankly terrible at picking up basic information when I'm browsing any sort of internet, and at a certain point I realized that I had no idea how anyone was hosting anything. Was everyone running their own home server just for this? Honestly, it wasn't out of the realm of possibility. But, as fate would have it, there are in fact plenty of places that host gemini sites, and as fate would have it I had just gotten accepted into one!
The cool thing about ssh is that it's incredibly light on the client system connecting to the server. This means that, in theory, I could connect to my host of choice straight from the eMac, making it the ultimate browsing and maintenance machine for my presence on the smolnet. The only problem was, the version of SSH supported by the eMac is so old that nobody in their right mind would create any way for the client to be able to connect to any server. So I would have to find another way in. My first idea was to install a new client for the system, something with an updated version of SSH that could actually connect to servers configured in this millenium. Unfortunately all hope of that fell through pretty quickly because, well, powerPC is very old and not very well supported without upgrading the operating system of the computer along with it. I'm trying to keep the information on the drive safe, so for the time being that is out of the question.
The solution, as it turned out, was staring me straight in the face. If I'm able to connect to the internet through my laptop, surely I would be able to connect to my laptop and then connect out to the internet, right? The answer, much to the chagrin of all well studied network engineers, is yes.