Oldest piece of hardware a user could access the internet with?

"Accessing the internet" is a fairly broad term. In general, all machines supporting IPv4 and some sort of interface (UART for SLIP/PPP or Ethernet) can access the internet. However, older machines will not be able to use more modern services like ssh or the web due to compute power or memory limitations and you will obviously not be able to connect to IPv6-only hosts.

So, for example a PDP11 running 2.9BSD (e.g. a 11/70 from 1975) should suffice, but there are other machines of similar vintage that support IPv4. You can also try putting a virtual PDP11 on the net using the simh emulator (http://simh.trailing-edge.com) and 2.9BSD from TUHS (https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Distributions/UCB/2.9BSD/).

"access"... If you wanted, an old vt100/vt220 or whatever other hardware serial terminal you like can be connected to a linux or other system and access a shell account with text browsers etc. In that scenario the terminal is "accessing the internet". (Did this with a Televideo 970 in 2007 iirc for the ebay listing where we sold it)

If you want something to run an IP stack, then a 286 running `ka9qnos` is about as small as can do hardly anything useful, probably. There might be a c64 IP stack but at that point its getting technicality again; how much access and function counts?

If you're looking for paranoid security in cheap hardware, 486 for absolute purists (runs linux handily, good luck with the graphics, matrox card ruled), and up to .. ppro? p3? or so if you're slightly less pure.

Or get Sparc 5 or alpha or etc "exotic" hardware of that era and have an extra layer of obscurity plus years of unpatched security holes in any software you can make run today.

Not sure if this counts, but I wrote my first program in 1972, when I was 8 years old. On an old mechanical teletype, connected via an acoustically coupled modem to a mainframe in the other end of the city. I only saw the BASIC interpreter, but my father told that they were doing some calculations abroad, even in the US, where he could get cheaper night time when it was daytime in Finland.

Edit: Those remote jobs were most likely batch jobs, and I am not sure how they got the stuff over, may not have been over a network connection.

I just realized the semi-stupidity of my question. I should have said "modern web", considering the ARPANET could be considered a type of "internet" (?) that ran using hardware from 1969?

Thank you for the replies though, something to read up on.

> accessing the internet

is too broad. A C64 with a modem can access IRC and BBS

> minimal modification/add-on

This is a bit broad too. Every modern "add-on" has more power most of the old computer they are attached on.

You could run a proxy on the add-on, that would shrink pictures, html and remove https.

Or even simpler. The add-on could do all the computation and just use the old hardware to show the result.

As of RFC 1149 [1], I guess a pigeon?

[1]: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1149

https://medium.com/swlh/connecting-a-286-dos-pc-to-the-inter...

At least as old as Commodore 64: http://www.armory.com/~spectre/cwi/hl/shots.html

Pretty much anything with a serial port and a CPU should be able to get online, provided you have appropriate software.

Most computers built after 1980 should be able to do it with some tinkering. Pretty much anything built after 1990 should be fairly trivial to get online.

If you want something somewhat usable, then Lynx/Links running on whatever a modern Linux distro can boot on should suffice.

I used a modem to get online with my Amiga 600 (7 MHz 68000, 2 + 4 MB RAM) in the 90's. It was perfectly possible to use things like IRC, eMule and a WWW browser on it, but the modern web will be quite unusable with aMosaic...

I suspect the oldest, and likely the first machine to properly support it would be the Xerox Alto,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_Alto

Ethernet and the Alto both can from PARC.

https://www.lemon64.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=61225

What amount of assistance are we talking? There are IP stacks for IBM PC with DOS and for C64. I have Ethernet for my 5150. I have a device that turns a Raspberry Pi into a peripheral for a Ti-99/4A which can provide an Internet connection to the TI machine. I have another device that uses an ESP2866 or so to get anything with a serial port onto wifi. I a DECMate III which is a PDP-8 class machine that can get on the web. I have a couple of Livingston Portmaster 2e access concentrators that can give dozens of systems IP access via SLIP, PPP, or bare terminal-to-IP access. My 286 with OS/2 works fine for graphical browsing, but anything approaching modern TLS ciphers are a performance nightmare.

At a minimum, you're looking at as old as the 68020 Macs and the 386 PCs. The PDP-10, PDP-11, Amiga 1000, the earliest Sun machines (68k, pre-Sparc), and similar age machines from the 1980s and early 1990s having a really reasonable amount of functionality with the right options, OS version, drivers, and software.

There has to be a joke about fingering and gophers in this somewhere!

For a more modern (but still old) machine, Browservice might be of help:

- https://github.com/ttalvitie/browservice

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23595430

Dumb devices can also be controlled to some degree- power can be easily switched using smart plugs, and you can convert an Arduino to use its GPIOs to "press" buttons

I remember some implementations of TCP/IP stack on ZX, but don't remember if it was just a plan or finished product and I think they wrote about lynx as a browser?

Human brain. IP protocol is computable by humans. There is even RFC for transferring packets over pigeons.

I started out in the 90s with telnet, gopher, et al on a Mac IIci, and a 386 that had Win 3.10 and Trumpet winsock installed. Sun/SGI were user friendly-ish. I suppose there was bigger iron available, and a few home computers that tcpip was backported to. But they'd be harder to come by.