Browse the modern web on vintage Macs.
A macOS proxy server that bridges the gap between classic Macintosh computers (1984–2005) and today’s internet. It runs on your modern Mac and handles all the heavy lifting — TLS, HTML5, modern image formats — so your old Mac doesn’t have to.
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| _____________________________ |
| | | |
| | Netscape: apple.com | |
| | ________________________ | |
| | | |
| | Welcome to Apple.com | |
| | 4.7MB -> 12KB (HTML 3.2) | |
| | 23 images transcoded | |
| | | |
| | > Think different. | |
| | -- a Quadra 605, 2026 | |
| | | |
| |_____________________________| |
| _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ |
| |_||_|_|_|_|_|_|_|_|_|_|_|_||_|| |
| _ ___ _ _ ___ _ _ _ ___ _ |
| |_||___| | ||___| ||_|_|___||_| |
|___________________________________|
\ ________________________ /
\ / \ /
\_/ Macintosh Classic II \__/
Five miracles of modern engineering, performed at 8080 requests per hour.
Old Macs can’t do TLS 1.2, let alone 1.3. RetroGate fetches HTTPS sites with modern encryption and serves them back as plain HTTP. Your Quadra doesn’t need to know about certificate chains. It has enough problems.
Converts modern HTML5/CSS3/JS pages into clean HTML 3.2 that Netscape 2, MacWeb, and iCab can actually render. React components go in, <table> layouts come out. It’s beautiful. In a 1996 kind of way.
Converts WebP/AVIF to JPEG/GIF, resizes images to vintage-friendly dimensions, and applies dithering for low-color displays. A 4000×3000 DSLR photo becomes a 600px GIF that your Mac Plus displays with gorgeous halftone elegance.
Set a date, and RetroGate fetches every page from the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. Browse the web as it was in 1997. See Apple.com before the iMac. See Google before the logo. See GeoCities before Yahoo killed it. Weep accordingly.
When Netscape Navigator tries to reach home.netscape.com and finds only the void, RetroGate redirects it to the Wayback Machine archive. The internet of 1999 lives on, even if Netscape doesn’t.
Point your vintage browser to http://retrogate/ and you get a start page
with a DuckDuckGo-powered search box, curated links, and Wayback status.
No JavaScript, pure HTML 3.2. It’s like Google in 1998, except it actually
respects your privacy.
90 seconds to time travel. The hardest part is typing on a vintage keyboard.
Open RetroGate on your modern Mac. The proxy server starts automatically. A gold antenna icon gently pulses, which is RetroGate’s way of saying “I’m ready, send me your decrepit HTTP requests.”
Note the proxy address (e.g. 192.168.0.130:8080). On your vintage Mac, set the HTTP proxy to this address. If you’re using SheepShaver, the host is at 10.0.2.2. Easy.
Type a URL. Any URL. Watch in awe as a website built with React, Tailwind, and the hopes of a thousand npm packages gets lovingly downgraded into something your Quadra 605 can render.
Enable Wayback Machine mode, pick a date, and browse the web as it actually existed. Temporal consistency included — no cursed pages where the HTML is from 1999 but the images are from 2007.
This is where RetroGate transcends “proxy server” and becomes “time machine.”
When enabled, RetroGate fetches pages from the Internet Archive instead of the live internet. You’re not just transcoding modern pages — you’re browsing the actual web as it existed in the past.
Temporal consistency ensures all sub-resources (images, CSS) load from the same date. Date drift guard warns you when snapshots stray too far. Response caching means archived pages load instantly after the first fetch — because a page from June 15, 1999 will be the same page from June 15, 1999 after the heat death of the universe.
Learn More →From back when "the cloud" was just weather.
| Preset | Year | Resolution | Colors | HTML Level |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| System 6 | 1988 | 512 × 342 | B&W (1-bit) | Aggressive |
| System 7 | 1991 | 640 × 480 | 256 Colors | Aggressive |
| Mac OS 8 | 1997 | 832 × 624 | Thousands | Moderate |
| Mac OS 9 | 1999 | 1024 × 768 | Millions | Moderate |
| Mac OS X | 2001 | 1024 × 768 | Thousands | Minimal |
| Windows 3.1 | 1992 | 640 × 480 | 16 Colors | Aggressive |
| Windows 95 | 1995 | 800 × 600 | 256 Colors | Moderate |
| Windows 98 | 1998 | 800 × 600 | Thousands | Moderate |
| Windows 2000 | 2000 | 1024 × 768 | Thousands | Minimal |
| Windows XP | 2001 | 1024 × 768 | Thousands | Minimal |
Historical note: System 6 (1988) and Windows 3.1 (1992) technically predate the World Wide Web. But they can run early browsers like MacWWW and Mosaic, so we’re being generous.
I haven’t been this excited since MacWorld 1998. My iMac G3 just loaded Wikipedia. WIKIPEDIA. I’m crying into my hockey puck mouse.
— A Bondi Blue iMac, age 27For 25 years I’ve stared at a “This page requires JavaScript” message. RetroGate showed me the actual content. I can die happy now. Well, die happier. My PRAM battery died in 2004.
— A PowerBook 520, emotionally compromisedThey said I was too old. They said 512×342 wasn’t enough. They said 1-bit was “limiting.” But look at me now — browsing Hacker News in gorgeous Floyd-Steinberg halftone. WHO’S LIMITING NOW?
— A Macintosh Plus, still bitterRetroGate converted a 4.7MB React SPA into 12KB of clean HTML 3.2. That’s a 99.7% reduction. I don’t know what React is but I know I don’t need it.
— A Quadra 605, doing just fineThe Wayback Machine mode let me browse Apple.com from June 1999. Steve was still wearing the black turtleneck. The store had colored iMacs. I saw the future before it happened. Then I went back to 1999 because it was better.
— An original iMac G3, getting nostalgicSheepShaver users: the host is at 10.0.2.2. You’re welcome. Also, yes, the networking drops after a while. That’s not a RetroGate bug. That’s a SheepShaver feature. (It’s a bug.)
— The SheepShaver FAQ, being honestRetroGate is free, open source (GPLv3 license), and takes about 90 seconds to set up. The other 85 of those seconds are spent typing an IP address on a vintage keyboard.