How a 40-Year Old Mac Connected Online with Clever Coding

Image: Hunter Irving on YouTube

One creative coder was recently able to revive a 1986 Macintosh Plus and successfully take it online, using nothing but a Raspberry Pi Pico W and his wits (via Tom’s Hardware).

There’s no shortage of retro Mac enthusiasts out there, but it’s rare to see an almost 40-year-old unit that’s not only in working condition but can even accomplish relatively modern things like browsing the internet. When maker, developer, and YouTuber Hunter Irving came across a 1986 Macintosh Plus at a thrift store, he decided to do some tinkering with it.

Computers as old as the 1986 Macintosh Plus aren’t usually capable of connecting to the networking equipment we use to access the internet today, let alone dealing with the modern internet protocols used to load websites.

To get around the first problem, Irving used a Raspberry Pi Pico W — along with a tool known as BlueSCSI — to emulate an old Ethernet adapter and trick the vintage Mac into thinking it was using compatible networking hardware.

BlueSCSI, a free, open-source tool that offers SCSI disk solutions for older computers, passed off the Raspberry Pi Pico W’s Wi-Fi connection as a rate Macintosh Ethernet adapter to the Macintosh Plus. The result was the Mac being able to access the modern internet.

Next, Irving had to deal with the Macintosh Plus’s inability to handle modern internet protocols like CSS or Javascript. Fortunately, this particular Macintosh model can handle some HTML. As such, Irving created MacProxy Plus, a fork of an existing tool known as MacProxy with custom extensions that can allow the 1986 Macintosh Plus to visit specific websites.

Supported websites include the National Weather Service, Wikipedia, Reddit, and ChatGPT. Irving was even able to get the retro Mac to “stream” YouTube videos using a creative workaround. Well, sort of — according to the developer, the Macintosh Plus was only able to receive around 400 bytes per second, taking a whopping 17 hours to load the infamous “Rickroll” video.

The 1986 Macintosh Plus is among the most iconic personal computers ever made, and it’s a treat to see a valuable piece of computing history be able to still (somewhat) get online. You can check out Irving’s full 1986 Macintosh Plus project below: