Now there’s a question you thought you’d never ask right? How long does it take for a 27 year old Macintosh computer to load the Hacker News website?

Well Jeff Keacher, a journalist, worldly renisscance man, engineer, consultant and founder of Blurity, an app that fixes blurry pictures, asked himself just that. For what seems like no more than the fun of it, Keacher set out to see if he could connect his 27 year old Mac Plus computer to the interwebs.

Often times on Facebook groups, or even in tech circles we talk about our computers of old. I just saw a re-run of Big Bang Theory where Sheldon spends a very animated time playing Zork on a text based games emulator. Of course if you’re at least 35 and had an Apple II, in your home you knew the fun of printing out 8 feet signs using Printshop on an Apple dot matrix printer, and of course playing Zork.

It’s that nostalgia that brings Keacher, and many like him, the same feeling of restoring an old car, when you can restore and successfully use a vintage computer, especially an Apple one. I couldn’t imagine tracking down my old Radio Shack TRS-80 or Commodore 64, but that’s for another day.

There’s something about those early Mac’s, especially for people like me who used them to put together the high school newspaper. Our school system in Maryland had just gotten a whole shipment of Macintosh computers and we had them in the newspaper room. The school had also set up a very unsecure Apple Talk network, the same network teachers used to enter grades and report cards. Let’s just say there was a whole bunch more than just the newspaper being “created” in that room. But that’s another story as well.

Keacher is an engineer so he’s by admission, good with a soldering iron. He also had the tech savvy to fire it up and get it on the net.  In his account of the experience he makes sure to point out that the his Kindle has better specs than that Mac Plus.

Admittedly, Keacher’s Mac Plus had already been on the net, at least as a dumb terminal, logging into BBS’s and such. But the Mac Plus never ran a TCP/IP stack of it’s own. Challenge on, and accepted.

You can read his entire account here, if you’re a mac geek or just a geek geek, you’ll love it.

In the end, Keacher was able to get his Mac Plus on the net. He checked out Wikipedia and Hacker News and below is the video showing just how long it took to get that Mac Plus on to the Hacker News site. It was slow, but mission accomplished. Bravo Jeff.

Read the rest of Jeff’s account here.