Browsers: December 2006 Archives

I've been working on the Powerbook 1400, the 10-year-old project computer I've been shaping up as much as I can to work in the 21st century. From cleaning the mold off of its bag to loading a new operating system to getting Ethernet to work on the office network and with my home DSL connection, it's been a geeky six-month journey, all chronicled at http://thisoldmac.blogspot.com (I'm not hot-linking until later because I am NOT hand-coding, and no blogging software supports browsers this old -- I'm using IE 5 for Macintosh at the moment).

I'm no techno-genius, and this project happened more due to the enticement of resurrecting a laptop for free than for any other reason. This past week, I got the Powerbook working on 802.11b wireless -- this from a computer produced when the World Wide Web itself was just getting off the ground (about three years into the WWW's life, I believe) and nobody had anything but dialup -- and wireless hadn't been invented, at least for Web connections.

While I've gotten it to work as well as I can, there's nothing like a modern (i.e made in the last two years) computer with fast processors, adequate memory and up-to-date software. But if you have to get along with old, creaky hardware, it can be done, and you will have fun doing it.