\n<\/p>\n
There were a plethora of tiny, local ISPs in the days of dial-up internet. Along with the big providers, many cities would have more than one. Some of those have survived broadband, but none of them were as small as [Jeff Geerling]\u2019s Pi ISP \u2014 a tiny dialup ISP<\/a> built so his Aunt\u2019s old G3 MacBook can get online at 36kbps, as God and [Robert Khan] intended.<\/p>\n Hardware-wise, the Raspberry Pi is at one end of the chain, and your retrocomputer at another. In between, you\u2019ll have a USB modem plugged into the Pi, and a device called a \u201ctwo-way line simulator\u201d to create a dial tone for that plain-old-telephone goodness. [Jeff] notes that these were commonly used in prisons for the phones that visitors use to talk to inmates.<\/p>\n Of course, since these devices are designed strictly for voice transmissions, which POTS was built for, you\u2019re not going to get over 36 kbps, and that\u2019s even with high-quality gear. The cheaper options might drop you down to 28k\u2026 just like with an ISP back in the day. \u2018You get what you pay for\u2019 is very rarely false.<\/p>\n Now, you can use this technology to just connect two computers together \u2014 as we\u2019ve featured previously <\/a>\u2014 but [Jeff] has gone the extra mile to put together, via Ansible, an easy-to-install software package that will let the Raspberry Pi act just like your ISP\u2019s servers once did, and connect you to that series of tubes once called the World Wide Web. Of course, the World Wide Web isn\u2019t built for dial-up anymore, so you\u2019re going to be waiting\u2026 a while. Hackaday\u2019s front page isn\u2019t especially heavy, weighing about 4MB at the time of this writing, but that\u2019s 15 minutes of load time, and you still aren\u2019t reading the articles.<\/p>\n You also won\u2019t be able to access much on old machines that can\u2019t do HTTPS, but [Jeff] thought of that and bundles [rdmark]\u2019s MacProxyClassic<\/a> to translate the modern web into HTML tags that Netscape can understand and serve them over HTTP. You\u2019ll still be waiting for our modern bloat, but perhaps not quite so long.<\/p>\n If you want the \u201cauthentic\u201d dial-up experience, you\u2019ll need to see the lightweight webpages of Yesteryear, and MacProxyClassic contains a Wayback Machine extension for that purpose. We featured a similar project a while back that did that<\/a>, but without all the joys of dial-up. Now get off the computer, we\u2019re expecting a call!<\/p>\n