Compile PubDomain Browser SourceCode for System 6?

Factual Questions
1

I’m playing around in System 6 for nostalia’s sake on an abandoned LC. Snagged a PDS Ethernet card for it and put it on our company’s network and…

• Mounted modern Sun and Windows and Macintosh AppleShare volumes on the Desktop

• Configured TCP using MacTCP

• Made FTP connections with Fetch

• Configured Eudora 1.3.1 and sent email to myself & received it on my regular box
(I also found the first Mac virus I’ve actually seen at large on a Mac in nearly 10 years. This sucker was infected with the CDEF virus. Good thing our servers aren’t using Apple File Server for System 6 as their OS. Doesn’t spread under MultiFinder or System 7 or later.)

Now the crowning achievement would logically be to post a MPSIMS thread, Hi, this is AHunter posting to you from System 6.0.8, etc. But no daylight in sight as far as finding an even moderately crappy browser that will do System 6, even with color.

It’s really not System 6’s fault, I think. It was an astonishingly advanced OS for its time, witness what I did manage to do with it in its first day of having ethernet. But the web mostly came along after System 6 was history, so the browsers that could’ve been written for it weren’t.

So, to the point: suppose I were to snag the source code for a decent tiny-footprint public domain browser. I could compile it as a 68K app if I had MPW or CodeWarrior (let’s just quit laughing at the possibility of me compiling anything in an environment requiring more input than Fink Commander, OK??), right? Now, if I did that, if I only used functions and calls that were supported in System 6, could I end up with a System 6 web browser capable of logging onto a vBulletin, Delphi, uBB, etc., bulletin board? Display standard JPEG and GIF graphics? CSS? Java? What would be the effective limits of what one could do?

System 6 is an 8-MB-max environment, although I think there are some possible cheats for that. My processor is an '020 but I’d consider an '030 upgrade card if it would let me run a System 6 browser.

(I do know that I can run System 7 on this beastie. But what’s the fun in that?)

2

Modern MPW (or really “modern”, in quotes, since it’s been effectively abandoned) includes OpenTransport libraries, but I don’t remember if it includes anything for using MacTCP. You can scan the headers in “Includes” and see. Also check the 68K libraries down inside “Libraries”.

I forget whether Color Quickdraw was available as an add-on extension for System 6. I don’t think it was. If not, then you can’t display color images in your browser, even if you could convert them from JPEG, PNG, etc.

Thread support of any kind — cooperative or preemptive — is unavailable in System 6 I think. You might be able to work around this with callbacks to asynchronous routines in the File Manager, or by using VBL tasks.

There’s a third-party library named GUSI you might want to look into. It provides a semi-POSIX layer on top of the Mac API and MPW libraries, along with socket support, and it plays nicely with MPW. It would probably come in handy when compiling open-source Unix software in general. However, it only promises support back to System 7. Note that GUSI is also an abandoned project.

Sure you don’t want to aim for System 7?

3

Color QuickDraw is actually in the ROMs of machines as old as the SE/30 (despite it having a black-and-white internal monitor; you could hook up an external and display color on it), and this is an LC. System 6 does color. I’m pretty sure it does it via Color QuickDraw. QuickTime it doesn’t have. And some image-display routines are calling on QuickTime to deal with image data even for still images.

I know there was a Thread Manager but I don’t think it could be used with System 6.

Maybe I should look instead for a System-6 compatible SSH utility and run Lynx remotely. (Or better yet a System-6 compatible X11 display environment, heh heh, now wouldn’t that be nice!).

4

Web Access For System 6 Macs
Mosaic

5

Hm. Would iCab or Netscape 2 or 3 run under System 6? I have run both under a Mac LC (slowly) on system 7. iCab in particular has an extremely low memory footprint–2 or 3 mb ram or thereabouts.

6

iCab is a System 7.x app, and the oldest copies of Netscape (I’ve actually got one called “Mosaic Netscape 0.98”) seem also to require System 7.

Plain-old Mosaic v1.0 is also a System 7 app :frowning:

I’d been to the website that Squink references. Lynx for Mac launches but kind of blows up — one window opens up with an incoherent title, looks like this. (Yes, System 6 does color screen shots and yes I uploaded it with Fetch 2.x).

The cfg. file it’s complaining about is in the Lynx folder and I’ve also put a copy at the root of the System 6 volume. Here’s the meat of it:

lynx.cfg file.

The default placement for this file is /usr/local/lib/lynx.cfg (Unix)

or Lynx_Dir:lynx.cfg (VMS)

…

On the MacOS, ~ represents the MacLynx folder

STARTFILE is the default URL if none is specified on the command line

or via a WWW_HOME environment variable.

note: these files can be remote (http://www.w3.org/default.html)

or local (file://localhost/PATH_TO/FILENAME

replace PATH_TO with the complete path to FILENAME

use Unix SHELL syntax and include the device on VMS systems)

STARTFILE:http://lynx.browser.org/

STARTFILE:http://www.google.com/
#(was previously set to ~/index.html)
The README says it’s for System 7 anyhow.

MacWeb, contrary to the cautious assertion by the site-owner, is pretty evidently a System 7 app only (I’ve got a 0.9.x copy, crashes, got a 1.0.x copy, says “You need System 7”). MacWWW does work but it’s way too primitive. I’m not griping about absence of Java and CSS here. Lynx (the OS X Terminal version) blows MacWWW totally out of the water.

Mind you, I’m not complaining about people trying to find me an existing System 6 browsing solution — that would be lovely.