GoKawiilBuild your own Dial-up ISP with a Raspberry Pi
Last year my aunt let me add her original Tangerine iBook G3 clamshell to my collection of old Macs.
It came with an AirPort card—a $99 add-on Apple made that ushered in the Wi-Fi era. The iBook G3 was the first consumer laptop with built-in Wi-Fi antennas, and by far the cheapest way to get a computer onto an 802.11 wireless network.
I go into more of the history of Apple's AirPort and iBook G3 in today's video (embedded below), but something I've always wanted to do is emulate a dial-up ISP locally.
What better way to do it than through Wi-Fi? Wait, what?
Wi-Fi as we know it today typically routes fiber or cable Internet connections, with bandwidth measured in megabits or even gigabits.
But WiFi in 1999 (when the AirPort was released) maxed out at 11 Mbps. And half that, in real world conditions.
It's hard to find an AirPort Base Station with an intact Apple leaf.
The AirPort Base Station included a 10base-T Ethernet jack (for the rare few who had access to broadband), alongside a 56K dial-up modem. Most people going wireless in 1999 were still using AOL or some other dial-up ISP.
I had purchased a used first-generation AirPort Base Station years ago for an unrelated project that never got anywhere, so I figured I'd challenge myself this #MARCHintosh to see if I could run my own local dial-up ISP, using a Raspberry Pi—and then unite dial-up speed with 802.11b Wi-Fi!
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