Dial "1" for Wi-Fi

TL;DR

Jeff Geerling connects a 1999 iBook G3 to the modern internet via a Raspberry Pi dial-up ISP routed through the original AirPort base station's built-in modem.

Key Points

• 1.Apple's 1999 AirPort base station brought Wi-Fi to the masses. Steve Jobs famously negotiated Lucent's WaveLAN chipset down from $300 to $50, enabling consumer Wi-Fi at least a year earlier than it otherwise would have arrived.
• 2.Dial-up over POTS maxed out at 33.6 kbps in practice, not the advertised 56k. Analog phone line limitations cap the setup at V.34 speeds, and loading modern CNN (23MB, no ads) would take 1.5 hours at those rates.
• 3.The ISP backbone is a Raspberry Pi running open-source Pi ISP software. A StarTech USB 56K hardware modem connects to a Viking DLE-200B phone line simulator (the kind used in prisons) to create a real POTS dial-up environment.
• 4.mgetty and PPP handle the actual dial-up connection on the Pi server side. mgetty answers the ring and negotiates the protocol, then hands off to PPP, which creates a virtual network interface and shares the connection to all AirPort clients.
• 5.MacProxy Classic on the Pi lets the 1999 browser load modern HTTPS websites. It strips SSL, rescales images, and even has a bitmap mode for very old machines — enabling the iBook to browse jeffgeerling.com and the Wayback Machine over Wi-Fi dial-up.
• 6.A Wayback Machine plugin lets the iBook browse the web as it appeared in July 1999. This revealed the original Apple.com iBook launch page, animated GIFs on the White House site, and an offer to send 'electronic email' to the president.
• 7.Newer Macs largely could not connect to the original AirPort base station. A PowerBook G3 with the era-matched WaveLAN card worked, a dual 2GHz G5 with a Broadcom PCI-E card connected but passed no traffic, and a modern MacBook Neo refused entirely.