Modern Surfing On Retro Boards
[Put Publish Date Here]
It's fun to revisit older computers. I quite enjoying firing one up, taking a peek at older software, and playing classic PC games on specs that people may have been using back in the day. There's a pretty big catch though, especially for machines from the mid-late 90s to even devices released just over a decade ago. While the hardware inside a computer may be near perfect snapshot of the technical time period that the machine was made for, the widespread adoption and continued evolution of the World Wide Web means that hardware and software built for the informational super highway eventually gets too obselete to really interact with the web in any meaningful way. On one hand, this isn't really a big deal. You're very likely to have a modern device that's perfectly capable of surfing today's web and isn't open to years of security exploits that can target decades old operating systems that haven't seen any sort of official updates in years. Even if my Pentium II class machine can hop onto Google with RetroZilla I'm not watching YouTube or even really checking my email. However, not having an internet connection means I'm missing a pretty big advertised part of the Windows 98 experience. So how do we ignore the warnings of security-minded folks and take an old beige box online? You've got some options.
RetroZilla
The easiest option for Windows 9x machines in my experience is a browser called RetroZilla. It's essentially a very old version of Firefox that is maintained by the community. It's designed to be more compatible with the modern web, letting you access more sites than something like Firefox 2 or earlier Internet Explorers. The catch is that, while it can access more sites, it's ability to display modern websites is very limited. I used to use RetroZilla on my actual Windows 98 PC to browse MobyGames for suggestions. Then Atari updated MobyGames, and this is what it looks like in RetroZilla.
As you can see, the site is practically unusable. This browser has no idea how to handle the advancements of HTML5 and modern CSS. A lot of the time, sites just give me a blank page. The Internet Archive is where I'd turn to for downloading games that I find on MobyGames. In the past the layout on there would be a little broken but still navigable. I guess that changed at some point because now I just get a solid white screen when trying to browse it. So if I wanted to put games on my machine that lacks a disc drive I'd have to find them on my modern desktop and put them on a USB stick to move over the ISOs. It's technically still better than what I get on the other modern sites I try to browse. While RetroZilla is more compatible with modern security protocol it's not fully compatible. So a lot of sites look like this.
So really the most I can recommend using RetroZilla for is a little bit of tinkering and retro sites that are built to be compatible.
[Section on Lynx]
[Section on Arachne]
[Section on WRP]
[Section on Browservice]
[Conclusion]