[HN Gopher] Cy384/ssheven: A modern SSH client for Mac OS 7/8/9
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       Cy384/ssheven: A modern SSH client for Mac OS 7/8/9
        
       Author : Aloha
       Score  : 125 points
       Date   : 2021-07-31 20:50 UTC (2 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (github.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
        
       | tambourine_man wrote:
       | >input latency feels high because redrawing the screen is slow
       | (along with all the encryption, which is also slow)
       | 
       | Is modern encryption a challenge to those old machines? Is it
       | because of specialized encryption hardware or sheer brute force?
       | 
       | Or is it just this implementation that's slow?
       | 
       | I used telnet back in the 68k days.
        
         | techrat wrote:
         | > Is modern encryption a challenge to those old machines?
         | 
         | Ooooooh yeah. It's got some serious overhead on single core
         | systems several-hundred-megahertz systems without the
         | instructions that are used to accelerate encryption these days.
         | AES is what modern CPUs use to help with that. It wasn't until
         | Power7+ before encryption was accelerated on that class of
         | CPUs. The latest Mac to use Power CPUs was discontinued 6 years
         | before that.
        
         | Lammy wrote:
         | There was MacSSH, supporting SSH2 and up to MAC-SHA1/AES-256,
         | but it required System 7.5 and 32MB rather than this project's
         | System 7.1/2MB:
         | https://web.archive.org/web/20071016100910/http://pros.orang...
        
         | Gibbon1 wrote:
         | > Is modern encryption a challenge to those old machines?
         | 
         | I've used modern encryption/mac routines on small embedded
         | micro's and they seem reasonably efficient. Couple of
         | operations per byte. They have to be fast because they are used
         | for decrypting stuff like streaming video. I think an exception
         | is password hashing algorithms which are slow by design.
         | 
         | That said some of the older algorithms are really inefficient.
         | Hundreds of ops per byte.
        
       | bibinou wrote:
       | the machine it's probably tested on:
       | http://www.cy384.com/projects/centris-650.html
        
       | BugsJustFindMe wrote:
       | This is a real work of art. I have no words.
        
       | Lammy wrote:
       | This is fantastic! I love the CLARIS-inspired "box" art too
       | https://i.imgur.com/P9G7jOx.jpg
        
         | tambourine_man wrote:
         | Came here for this exact comment. The artwork is spot on.
         | 
         | That, by itself alone, would have been amazing.
         | 
         | I don't miss the lack of memory protection of classic Mac OS,
         | but I do miss everything else.
        
           | grishka wrote:
           | Didn't last Mac OS 9 versions have memory protection? I mean
           | there's a reason it's hard to run 9.2 on an emulator -- it
           | requires a working MMU.
        
             | tambourine_man wrote:
             | No, after 8.6 the system featured a micro kernel on which
             | the old OS ran atop. I think you could opt in for better
             | stability, but I'm not sure. But most of the OS and apps
             | still ran on the same shared memory space with cooperative
             | multitasking, meaning a single app could (and did) bring
             | the whole system down.
             | 
             | I think you can emulate 9.2 just fine, but it's been a
             | while since I played with this things.
        
             | fay59 wrote:
             | Mac OS 9 has virtual memory (it uses virtual address
             | translation and it can swap pages to disk), but it still
             | has a single address space that is shared between every
             | application.
        
         | azalemeth wrote:
         | I genuinely think it fits right in. Apple always had a good
         | aesthetic, even when everything was beige and rectangular. I
         | did a giant chunk of my school work on Claris Works, before I
         | discovered latex. Happy memories.
        
           | Lammy wrote:
           | If only I could still get laptops with the keys printed in
           | Univers 57 Condensed Oblique :) https://catalog.monotype.com/
           | font/linotype/univers/57-conden...
        
             | [deleted]
        
           | dTal wrote:
           | That aesthetic was widespread throughout the PC universe in
           | the 90s as well. I remember having a giant clip-art library
           | that came on a whole bunch of CDs, and actually came with a
           | catalog _book_ to leaf through. A lot of it looked like that.
           | Another example is Microsoft 's clipart library, (in)famous
           | for its images of the "screen bean" guy.
        
       | voidfunc wrote:
       | Love quirky projects like this
        
       | supernintendo wrote:
       | Oh wow, thank you for this. :) I was just restoring an iMac G3,
       | the Flower Power edition, and ran into more trouble than I
       | expected trying to transfer data via a USB flash drive.
       | Filesystems that Mac OS 9 should support were either not mounting
       | properly or causing errors during file transfer when formatted on
       | a modern Apple or Linux system (exFAT was the only one I could
       | get to work for some reason). I've been casually looking around
       | for some sort of NAS solution that would be compatible with older
       | versions of Mac OS, but with native scp I can just download files
       | from a Linux box (perhaps a dedicated Raspberry Pi) and skip
       | right to the fun part: exploring all of the weird, cool and
       | charming software and games from this era. So cool!
        
       | rcarmo wrote:
       | This is amazing. I am going to try running this on a Raspberry Pi
       | emulating System 7, and relive the hours I spent logging in to
       | remote machines back in the dial-up days.
        
         | vaxman wrote:
         | You're holding it wrong..this is for connecting a classic Mac
         | to a Raspberry Pi.
        
           | kzrdude wrote:
           | I think you misread, maybe
        
       | sharikous wrote:
       | This is really wonderful. I can transform my old 68k machine to a
       | dumb terminal and do real work!
        
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       (page generated 2021-07-31 23:00 UTC)