connect classic mac os 8.1 to internet ethernet

Unfortunately, I don’t have any space to set it up next to my router, so I needed to make it wireless. Happily, it has an ethernet port, so that’s already most of the hurdles crossed. Now look, since we’re all gathered around it in my living room, I can’t let you go without a little tour around the G3 itself.

Today, a computer that effectively doesn’t connect to the Internet strikes a regular user as pretty useless, and it makes you wonder, really, what the hell we used computers for in the days before the Internet. It’s a notable shift in how we use computers now compared to only a few years ago. And of course you can’t-even if you succeed in connecting it to the Internet, the browser standards and media requirements have moved on so much that asking it to display anything more complex than is almost guaranteed to fail-as here, loading the Macworld homepage on the G3. Perhaps I’m not typical, but I suspect that, like me, when you boot a vintage Mac, the first actual thing you do, after admiring the hardware and OS, and having a bit of a poke around in the Control Panels, is go to launch a browser so you could share your latest acquisition on Twitter, catch up with what’s happening on Facebook, or perhaps satisfy an itch to catch up with House of Cards on Netflix. The overwhelming majority of the traffic on our networks is actually flowing straight out of and into our apartments, condos, and houses as we become more and more dependent on the Internet and the world-wide web for work and for play. For most of us, though, at least at home, that kind of stuff-puttering about on the network of devices within our homes-represents a vanishingly small percentage of what we actually use our networks for. Besides, in those early days of the Mac, networking was just about sharing files and sharing network resources such as printers.

Connect classic mac os 8.1 to internet ethernet