Smolnet Portal and SGI
======================
I remember times when I was able to do almost all on-line work on the
IRIX. Internet banking, browsing, online shopping and so on. The IRIX
6.5 has been able to run the Netscape up tp 4.7, the Firefox up to
3.0.19 and the latest Lynx, among others. Some things required helpers
like youtube_dl, some thing were unavailable at all (do you remember
then ActiveX or the Flash?)
But these times are gone. There is no recent SSL implementation
available and even if if will be then many modern cyphers are too
CPU-demanding so even my 250 MHz MIPS R10k CPU will not be able to
handle them. So, no https:// at all.
While there are any things which works even today (http://, gopher://,
ftp://, mp3 streams...) most of "modern" stuff is out of reach. This is
a problem as even the WikiPedia uses the HTTPS protocol and... even the
Gemini protocol (gemini://) is not realistic here.
Many things are available in the Gopherspace (even the wikipedia [1])
but many things aren't. OF course, one can use the FrogFind! [2] to
search and view web pages and the 68k.news [3] for some news. The [2]
and [3] were designed with 68k Macintoshes in mind. Almost any 1990s
SGI is way faster and more capable than these machines so it's easy to
use these services. The issue is that images generated by the FrogFind!
are absurdly small for normal resolutions of SGI machines (1280x1024 in
average). Well, Apples of that era were far behind in this aspect...
Well, but how about the rest? Some people tend to use the Gemini
(gemini://) protocol for some reasons and don't publish their stuff on
the Gopher.
This is where the Smolnet Portal [4] helps. The page says that it's the
gemini:// to https:// proxy but it also supports the plain http://! So
it can be used with old machines like SGI's are. The Firefox (3.0.x,
you remember) work rather well with the proxy, even national encodings
are preserved AND properly rendered.
The Netscape 4.7.x works quite well, too. It's Netscape so pages look a
bit worse than in the Firefox but it's also way faster than the
Firefox. (for some reasons the Firefox on the SGI O2 has been always
terribly slow)
Also, there is a WWW simplifier available for the Gemini, the
NewsWaffle [5]. One can combine these things to get a simplified
(thus easier to render and read)web pages into one's favorite
IRIX Web browsed. For example, I can read the Czech IT news
portal Roo [6] when entering this address to address barr of my
Firefox/Netscape/Lynx/Links/... (I have not tried the Mosaic, though):
http://portal.mozz.us/gemini/gemi.dev/cgi-bin/waffle.cgi/article%3Fhttps%253A%252F%252Fwww.root.cz
(thanks much for pointing me to than on the on the Mastodon!)
It does not solve all problems but it makes many parts of the modern
WWW accessible.
Anyway, many thanks to anyone who still makes available their WWW pages
for the old good HTTP!
References:
[1]
gopher://gopherpedia.com
[2]
http://frogfind.com
[3]
http://68k.news
[4]
http://portal.mozz.us
[5] gemini://gemi.dev/cgi-bin/waffle.cgi/
[6]
https://root.cz
