#frogfind — Public Fediverse posts

#retrocomputing #frogfind #searchengine #unix #retawq

👻 Another Ghost in the Logs: When a UNIX Classic Says Hello

Usually, a morning logfile analysis is just a noisy stream of AI scrapers, script kiddies, and SEO bots. But this week, FrogFind’s logs caught a true retro artifact: retawq/0.2.6c [en] (text). 🎣

Seeing a terminal-based browser from 2004 bravely navigating the web of 2026 demands absolute respect!

🕰️ What exactly is retawq?
When we think of text browsers, we usually think of Lynx or w3m. But retawq is a highly optimized, multi-threaded text-mode browser from the early 2000s (this specific version dropped in 2004). Built in C for POSIX systems, it relies purely on curses/ncurses for terminal output. No JavaScript, no bloated CSS, no trackers—just blazing-fast, pure text. 💻

🐸 The FrogFind Magic
If this classic browser hit a modern website today, it would instantly choke on megabytes of React and Angular scripts. This is where FrogFind steps in as the perfect translator.

FrogFind strips away the modern bloat and serves pure, lightweight HTML. For retawq, this is a feast: it perfectly renders ASCII tables, keeps links keyboard-navigable, and delivers a flawless text flow. ⚡

🎯 Mission Accomplished
Log entries like this are the ultimate proof of why we do this. Somewhere out there, someone is sitting at a classic UNIX box, a vintage Linux setup, or an old SPARC workstation, reading the daily news in a terminal window.

No cookie popups. No flashing ads. Just pure information, exactly how the web was meant to be. This is why we keep the retro web alive! 🚀

#retrocomputing #frogfind #searchengine #wannabe #macos

👻 Spotting a Ghost in the Logs: The Return of the WannaBe Browser 🍏
While combing through our recent quarantine logs to hunt down relentless modern bots, an absolute vintage gem surfaced from the noise: a user agent identifying itself simply as WannaBe! 🕵️‍♂️🐸

What is WannaBe? 💾
For those who didn't surf the web on a Macintosh in the late 90s, WannaBe is a legend. Developed by David Pierson, it’s a lightning-fast, text-only browser for Classic Mac OS (System 7 to OS 9). By completely ignoring images, plugins, and CSS, it renders pure, unadulterated text. 🚀

Why it rules: 🛠️

Blistering Speed: Loads pages instantly, even over a screeching 14.4k dial-up modem. ☎️

Minimal Footprint: Runs effortlessly on older 68k Macs that would completely choke on Netscape Navigator. 📉

Mac-Native Feel: Beautifully integrates with the classic Mac OS interface. 🖥️

At OSfOM (Open Systems for Open Minds), our philosophy is all about keeping historical hardware alive and functional. WannaBe strips away the modern web bloat, leaving only the information. When paired with a text-friendly search gateway, it transforms an isolated beige Mac into a highly capable research tool. 🧠✨

Seeing this pop up in the access logs proves the retro web is thriving. To whoever is out there currently browsing via WannaBe: keep the classic Mac OS running, and happy surfing! 🏄‍♂️🍻

#Confession: It's slightly difficult to tell people not to use LLMs to summarize search results when actually dipping into a webpage for the information you need is so flipping painful and annoying. :/

Someone needs to write a searchbot kind of like #FrogFind that does a web search for you and presents you with a static html version of any usable results. Kind of like having a #Dillo front end to the web minus all of the typical JS nonsense.

#retrocomputing #frogfind

🐸 FrogFind v2.6 – The Platinum Update (July 2026)

🛡️ Security & Anti-Bot

MySQL Penalty Box: Aggressive scrapers and policy violators now receive temporary, database-driven IP bans.

WAF-Level Protection: A restructured parser drops modern crawlers (Node.js, Bluesky-bots, SEO scrapers) instantly, protecting API quotas.

Fuzzy Blacklist: Smart substring detection now catches intentionally misspelled inappropriate queries.

🕵️‍♂️ Proxy & Readability

3-Tier Anti-Scraping Fallback: Defeats massive WAFs (Cloudflare/Datadome) via a smart escalation chain.

Latency Optimization: Enforced Connection: close and strict 6-second timeouts prevent hanging loads.

Local Image Cache: Speeds up rendering for vintage machines and saves external API limits by serving previously requested images locally.

🖥️ Retro-Browser Compatibility

VIP Pass for Exotics: Added specific detection for rare systems like the Apple IIGS, Mac 68k, early WAP phones, and Hobby-OS proxies.

Unknown UA Logging: Safely logs unrecognized, non-bot user agents for future parser updates.

Legacy Windows Fallback: Added resource links for modern browsers (Supermium & MyPal) tailored for older Windows machines.

🥚 UX & Visual Prepends

Non-Destructive Easter Eggs: Visual gags and warnings no longer overwrite search results! They now render elegantly above the actual links in matching retro themes (e.g., Mac OS 9 or C64 Basic).

📊 Analytics & Admin Radars

Auto-Archiving: Database browser stats now automatically clean themselves up and rotate into a MonthlyArchive table.

#retrocomputing #frogfind #searchengine #offbyone

🌐 Off By One: The Tiny Browser Rebel of the 2000s
Today's web browsers are massive. The market is dominated by three huge engines (Blink, Gecko, and WebKit), and launching a browser usually means saying goodbye to gigabytes of RAM. But while checking the server logs recently, I spotted an absolute legend: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; OffByOne; Windows).

Seeing this browser alive in 2026 is a triumph of efficient software design. Let's take a quick look at the Off By One (OBO) browser.

💾 A Masterpiece of Efficiency
Back in the early 2000s, alternative browsers often just slapped a new interface over Microsoft's Trident (Internet Explorer) engine. Not Off By One. Developer HomeTies built OBO with a completely custom, from-scratch HTML rendering engine.

The most mind-blowing part? The entire executable was under 2 megabytes.

🛠️ Minimalist by Design
OBO was "plug & play" before it was cool. It required no installation, didn't clutter your Windows registry, and left a minimal footprint. You could just drop the .exe file onto a floppy disk or a USB stick and run it on any Windows machine instantly.

The core features:

Fully Independent: No reliance on Microsoft libraries or bloated third-party engines.

Zero Bloat: No tabs, no massive plugins, no JavaScript overload. Just pure, fast HTML 3.2 rendering.

Resource Marvel: Blazing fast, even on vintage Pentium hardware with minimal RAM.

🐧 The OSfOM Spirit
At Open Systems for Open Minds, this is exactly the kind of tech we love. OBO proves that the internet doesn't have to be a bloated, memory-hungry mess just to deliver information.

While it won't render today's heavy web apps, it is still a fantastic, lightning-fast tool for the text-based retro web. I highly recommend spinning it up in a vintage Windows VM to experience it yourself—bonus points if you use it to browse osfom.org!

If you manage to grab that screenshot of OBO running in your own VM, just drop it right below the title. That will give it the perfect authentic touch! 🚀🖥️

#retrocomputing #frogfind #searchengine #apple #iigs #appleiigs #tool130 # marinetti

🍏 1986 Calling: Surfing FrogFind on an Apple IIGS!
As you know, I regularly check the server logs to update the User-Agent parser for FrogFind. Usually, my job involves filtering out aggressive modern web scrapers, adding some obscure 2000s WAP browsers, or analyzing broken headers. But this week, the quarantine log caught an absolute legend.

Someone actually queried the modern web using an Apple IIGS from 1986!

To see a machine that is turning 40 years old actively rendering HTML in 2026 is simply mind-blowing.

The Network Magic: Tool130 & Marinetti 🌐
The User-Agent string in the server log revealed exactly how this vintage beast made its way onto the internet: Mozilla/2.0 (Compatible; Tool130; IIgs).

The TCP/IP Stack: Out of the box, the Apple IIGS obviously didn't ship with native internet capabilities. It connects to the web using Marinetti, a brilliant, community-built TCP/IP stack written specifically for the system.

The Engine: "Tool130" is the specific system tool extension within the Marinetti architecture that handles the TCP/IP protocols. It acts as the vital bridge, allowing early web browsers on the IIGS to talk to the servers of today.

Mission Accomplished 🐸
This log entry right here is exactly why FrogFind was built. We strip away the gigabytes of JavaScript, the bloated CSS frameworks, and the heavy encryption handshakes of the modern internet, returning pure, lightweight HTML. It proves that with a bit of proxy magic and a lot of passion, no computer is ever truly obsolete.

To the anonymous retro-surfer who fired up their Apple IIGS, loaded the TCP/IP stack into RAM, and typed a query into FrogFind: We salute you!

Keep the retro web alive! 🚀

Rainy day ... good idea to Start the Blade 2500 ;).

Anybody know a good source for the latest Solaris 10 CPU?

#retrocomputing #sun #solaris #unix #FrogFind #blade2500

#retrocomputing #vintagecomputing #search #searchengine #frogfind #news #update

🚀 FrogFind Update: AI Sleuths & Robust Images

Welcome to a new under-the-hood update! We've been working hard to make FrogFind not just more stable, but a whole lot smarter.

🧠 Meet "FrogBrain" (Shadow-Mode)
We've massively upgraded our spam defenses with a machine-learning filter trained on nearly a million toxic patterns. Don't worry, your retro-searches are safe! FrogBrain is currently running in a passive "Shadow-Mode." It silently evaluates traffic alongside our legacy filter, allowing us to fine-tune its accuracy before handing over full control.

🖼️ Image Viewer
Say goodbye to broken images and frustrating timeouts! We’ve completely swapped out the background fetching engine to elegantly handle modern server redirects. A major bonus: Those stubbornly blank pages when loading Wikimedia/Wikipedia images are finally a thing of the past.

📊 We’re now sitting back and letting the new systems quietly gather their telemetry. Enjoy a smoother, cleaner FrogFind experience!

#retrocomputing #vintagecomputing #search #searchengine #frogfind #NetBSD #Links #unix #lynx #unix

Catch of the Day: The text terminal on NetBSD lives! 🐧

Hey Retro Fans!

Many of us use FrogFind on graphical systems like Windows 95 or Mac OS 9. But at its core, FrogFind is a text-first project. Just how well this works was proven to us today by this guest:

Links 2.8 on NetBSD!

Among the BSD operating systems (the purist cousins of Linux), NetBSD is legendary for its portability. It's not for nothing that the NetBSD community's motto is: "Of course it runs NetBSD!" Whether on old toasters, a Sega Dreamcast, or obscure server hardware—NetBSD just runs.

The fact that someone today opens a terminal under NetBSD and fires up the text-based browser "Links" (a direct relative of Lynx) to search the web via FrogFind is pure command-line romance. No flashing banners, no intrusive JavaScript, just lightning-fast, raw text on one of the cleanest UNIX derivatives in the world.

Stay purist and keep hacking on the shell!
Your FrogFind Team 🐸

Emergency frog habitat construction. This buddy was in the rain barrel, somehow?

A Ranger's work is never done. #gardening #frogfind

#retrocomputing #vintagecomputing #search #searchengine #frogfind #DEC #VAX #VAXstation #OpenVMS #VMS_Mosaic

Catch of the Day: A Dinosaur on the Web – OpenVMS on a VAXstation! 🦖

Hey Retro Fans!

When we think of retro computing, most of us picture a beige tower PC, a C64, or an Amiga. But yesterday, our bouncer welcomed a true heavyweight from the depths of professional IT history:

VMS_Mosaic 4.0 on OpenVMS V7.3 (VAXstation 4000-VLC)!

Let that user agent sink in for a moment. DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation) was once a giant of the computer industry. Their VAX architecture and the accompanying OpenVMS operating system are absolute legends, famous for a level of stability that modern systems can often only dream of.

The VAXstation 4000-VLC ("Very Low Cost") hit the market in the very early 90s—a compact UNIX/VMS machine for professional use. The fact that someone in 2026 fires up this machine, launches the graphical Motif interface, and browses FrogFind using the native VMS_Mosaic browser is absolutely mind-blowing. It proves once again: With the right bridge (and FrogFind!), no architecture is too old for the internet.

A reverent toast to indestructible DEC hardware!

Your FrogFind Team 🐸

#retrocomputing #vintagecomputing #search #searchengine #frogfind #PowerPC #PowerFox #MacosX #Macos #apple

Catch of the Day: PowerFox on PowerPC – The community never gives up! 🦊⚡

Hey Retro Fans!

Many believe that old architecture eventually just becomes useless for the modern web. But our bouncer fished a browser out of the FrogFind pond today that proves the exact opposite:

PowerFox 128.0 on Mac OS X (PowerPC)!

For those who might not know: PowerFox (similar to TenFourFox or InterWebPPC) is a passionate community project. It's based on modern Mozilla engines but is painstakingly ported, tweaked, and compiled to run on old PowerPC processors (like the G4 or G5). Seeing a version number like "128.0" on a PowerPC is almost paradoxical—it's an attempt to squeeze current web standards onto hardware that Apple buried almost 20 years ago.

The fact that someone takes the time to boot up a G4 Mac, compile (or install) PowerFox, and use it to browse FrogFind is a wonderful sign of how dedicated the retro Mac community is.

Long live the PowerPC!

Your FrogFind Team 🐸

#retrocomputing #vintagecomputing #search #searchengine #frogfind #sgi #sgiindy #indy #irix #netscape #navigator

Catch of the Day: A visit from the SGI graphics forge! 🦖

Hey Retro Fans!

While many of us still had gray towers sitting under our desks in the late 90s, the world of high-end graphics looked completely different. And today, we had a visitor straight from that world:

Netscape Navigator 4.75C-SGI on an SGI IRIX system!

This is absolutely mind-blowing! SGI (Silicon Graphics, Inc.) built workstations that were as expensive as sports cars and as powerful as mainframes. Whether it was "Jurassic Park," "Terminator 2," or the architecture of the Nintendo 64—all of it was developed on SGI machines running the IRIX operating system.

The fact that today, in 2026, someone fires up their SGI Indy, Indigo, or perhaps even a massive Octane workstation, launches the Netscape 4.75C customized exclusively for IRIX, and browses the web on FrogFind simply goes to show: True hardware legends never die.

A reverent greeting to the lucky owner of this UNIX dream machine!

Your FrogFind Team 🐸

#retrocomputing #vintagecomputing #search #searchengine #frogfind #omniweb #nextstep #next #nextcube

Catch of the Day: Greetings from the Forefather of the Web! 🧊

Hey Retro Fans!
Hold on to your hats because last night we had a visit from absolute IT royalty on our server. Our bouncer logged this magical combination:

OmniWeb 3.1rc1 on a NeXTSTEP system!

Let that sink in for a moment. NeXTSTEP is the operating system Steve Jobs developed after he (temporarily) left Apple. And even more importantly: It was exactly such a NeXT system (the famous NeXTcube) on which Tim Berners-Lee programmed the very first web server and the first web browser in the world at CERN in 1990!

The fact that someone today is using NeXTSTEP and the legendary OmniWeb browser (which was developed exclusively for this platform in 1995) to find their way onto the modern internet via FrogFind is a goosebump moment for any tech historian. This isn't just retro—this is time travel to the architectural roots of Mac OS X and the World Wide Web itself.

A reverent toast to that magnificent black box cube!
Your FrogFind Team 🐸

#retrocomputing #vintagecomputing #search #searchengine #frogfind #netscape #gold #apple #macintosh #mac #navigator

Catch of the Day: All that glitters is Netscape Gold! ✨

Hey Retro Fans!
While many of us struggle with gigabyte-heavy browsers today, our bouncer welcomed true web royalty last night at 2:30 AM:

Netscape Navigator 3.01Gold on a Mac!

Who remembers the "Gold" edition? Back in 1996, this was the absolute premium standard. Netscape 3.0 Gold didn't just bring improved JavaScript support and LiveAudio; it was the first to feature an integrated WYSIWYG HTML editor ("Netscape Composer"). You could view websites and build them in basically the same window—a dream come true for 90s webmasters!

The fact that this roughly 30-year-old browser is still exploring the web from a classic Mac today and using our search engine is simply wonderful, and exactly the reason FrogFind exists.

Stay retro and surf in gold!
Your FrogFind Team 🐸

#retrocomputing #vintagecomputing #search #searchengine #frogfind #atari #highwire #toss

Catch of the Day: Greetings from the TOS Universe! 🕹️

Hey Retro Fans!

The eternal system wars of the 80s and 90s are long gone. Today, we are united by our love for vintage hardware. And even if some of us spend our weekends cleaning the motherboards of an Amiga 2000 and recapping its power supply, you simply have to tip your hat to today's incredible catch:

HighWire 0.3.3 on an Atari ST / TOS!

A genuine Atari ST (or perhaps a TT/Falcon) was browsing FrogFind today! For those who might not know: HighWire is an absolutely fantastic open-source web browser, written in pure C, specifically designed for the GEM graphical environment of Atari computers. It even supports basic CSS and images—a true masterpiece of programming for this hardware architecture.

The fact that in 2026 someone is connecting their Atari to the modern web using a network cartridge (or via serial SLIP/PPP) to use our little search engine is simply brilliant. A wonderful piece of tech history lives on.

Cheers to the 16-bit era!
Your FrogFind Team 🐸

#retrocomputing #vintagecomputing #search #searchengine #frogfind #bang #update

🐸 FrogFind Update: Save Quota, Surf Faster – Introducing "Bang" Commands! ⚡
Hello Retro Fans!

If you’ve ever tried typing a long search query on a clunky 30-year-old mechanical keyboard, you know it can be a bit of a workout. But typing isn't the only thing we want to optimize. Behind the scenes, FrogFind relies on modern search APIs (like Google and Brave) to fetch your results before stripping them down for your vintage browsers. These APIs come with strict daily limits (quotas).

Every time someone searches for "Macintosh Garden Classilla" or "Aminet Directory Opus", it eats into our daily search quota. But what if there was a way to skip the middleman, save our precious API calls, and get you to your favorite retro sites even faster?

Enter Bang Commands (inspired by DuckDuckGo)!

How it works & The "Why"
Starting today, you can use shortcuts directly in the FrogFind search bar. If you type a bang (like !mg) followed by your search term, FrogFind completely bypasses the Google/Brave search engines. Zero API quota is used!

Instead, FrogFind takes your query, securely contacts the target archive directly, and feeds the results straight into our read.php text-parser. You get the exact same lightweight, retro-friendly HTML output, but much faster and without draining the daily search limits.

We tested dozens of sites, but the modern web is heavily guarded by Cloudflare and JavaScript walls. We aggressively removed any site that threw a 404 error or a captcha to keep your experience 100% frustration-free.

Here are the "Glorious Five" fully supported Bang Commands that survived the gauntlet:

💾 Software & System Archives

!mg (Macintosh Garden)
Example: !mg Classilla
Searches the ultimate library for classic Mac OS software and routes the results through our text filter.

!am (Aminet)
Example: !am Protracker
Direct access to the world's largest Amiga software archive.

📚 Retro Knowledge & Wikis

!w (Wikipedia English) / !wde (Wikipedia German)
Example: !w Commodore 64
Bypasses search engines and pulls the Wikipedia article straight into FrogFind’s highly compatible reader.

🌐 Native Retro Search Engines

!wiby (Wiby.me)
Example: !wiby Web Design
Searches Wiby, a search engine specifically dedicated to the classic, CSS-free Web 1.0. A match made in heaven!

🕹️ Demoscene

!pouet (Pouët)
Example: !pouet Second Reality
Search the central hub of the demoscene directly from your vintage rig.

Give it a try!
Just type your bang command directly into the FrogFind search bar on your old machine. It’s a massive time-saver and helps keep the FrogFind servers running smoothly for everyone. We will add a small "Cheat Sheet" link to the homepage soon so you won't have to memorize them all.

Happy surfing!
Your FrogFind Team 🐸

#retrocomputing #vintagecomputing #search #searchengine #frogfind #planetweb #sega #dreamcast

Catch of the Day: The "Planetweb" of Early Consoles! 🪐🎮

Hey Retro Fans!
Hold onto your controllers, because our FrogFind radar has caught an absolute exotic gem from the golden era of video game consoles today:

Planetweb 2.613 on the Sega Dreamcast!

For those who didn't sit in front of their TV with a dial-up modem in the late 90s: Long before the PlayStation 4 or Xbox One had their own complex web browsers, Sega revolutionized couch surfing with the Dreamcast. In the US (and parts of Europe), the console often came bundled with a disc containing the Planetweb Browser.

This software was a minor miracle: It fit into the console's tiny RAM, managed the clunky 33.6k (or 56k) modem, and allowed players to read emails, search for cheat codes, or chat on SegaNet—all comfortably from the couch using a controller on a CRT television.

The fact that today, in 2026, someone gets a working Dreamcast online (likely using a Raspberry Pi as a modem emulator, affectionately known as a "Dreampi") and surfs FrogFind with the American Planetweb version is just magnificent. Sega does what Nintendon't!

Cheers to surfing with a controller!

Your FrogFind Team 🐸

#retrocomputing #vintagecomputing #search #searchengine #frogfind #NetBSD #arcticfox #unix

Catch of the Day: "Of course it runs NetBSD!" 🐡🦊

Hey Retro Fans!

Did you have a good weekend? Our bouncer at the FrogFind pond was certainly busy and waved a guest through yesterday that put a massive smile on our faces:

ArcticFox 52.9 on NetBSD!

Among hardcore Unix nerds, there is a famous catchphrase: "Of course it runs NetBSD!" This open-source operating system is legendary for its portability. It has been ported to run on almost anything with a processor—from old toasters and Sega Dreamcasts to massive server racks.

The fact that someone navigated to our pond using NetBSD is already awesome. But the combination with the ArcticFox browser makes it a masterpiece. ArcticFox is a lovingly maintained community fork (based on Pale Moon) specifically kept alive to enable modern browsing on exotic architectures, PowerPC Macs, and old UNIX derivatives.

Cheers to the tinkerers keeping exotic systems online!

Your FrogFind Team 🐸

#retrocomputing #vintagecomputing #search #searchengine #frogFind #apple #mac #powerpc #internetExplorer #tasman

Catch of the Day: The Forbidden Apple! 🍏🪟

Hey Retro Fans!
Hold on to your CRT monitors, because our FrogFind radar has caught something today that feels like a relic from a parallel universe. Among all the Nintendos and Linux machines, this legendary identifier appeared:

Internet Explorer 5.17 on Mac (PowerPC)!

For everyone rubbing their eyes right now: Yes, Internet Explorer existed for the Mac, and it was a big deal! Following the historic "peace treaty" between Steve Jobs and Bill Gates in 1997, Internet Explorer became the official default browser on all Apple computers for five years.

The craziest part? Mac IE was technically vastly superior to its Windows counterpart at the time! Microsoft built a completely bespoke rendering engine for Apple called Tasman, which was one of the very first to properly support CSS. Version 5.1.7 (released in the summer of 2003) was the absolute final update ever pushed for classic Mac OS 8 and 9 before Apple entirely shifted focus to their own browser, Safari.

The fact that today, over 20 years later, someone boots up an old PowerPC Mac (perhaps a colorful iMac G3?) and browses FrogFind with the Mac-exclusive Internet Explorer is a glorious time machine to an era when Microsoft and Apple surfed hand in hand.

Cheers to the Tasman engine!

Your FrogFind Team 🐸

#retrocomputing #vintagecomputing #search #searchengine #frogfind #ncsa #mosaic #ncsamosaic #sun #sparcstation #sgi #unix

Catch of the Day: The Forefather of the World Wide Web! 🏛️🕸️

Hey Retro Fans!

Hold your breath and bow in reverence. Today, our FrogFind radar didn't just catch an old browser; it caught the absolute foundation of the modern internet. Between all the Nintendos and dusty Windows PCs, this gigantic milestone appeared:

NCSA Mosaic 2.7b5 on UNIX (X11)!

For those who weren't online in the early 90s: Mosaic, developed at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), was the first web browser that could display images inline next to text (rather than in a separate window). Starting in 1993, it was the spark that made the World Wide Web appealing to the masses! The Mosaic team later went on to found Netscape, and even Microsoft's first Internet Explorer was based on licensed Mosaic code.

The fact that today, in 2026, someone boots up a UNIX machine (perhaps an old Sun SPARCstation or an SGI) and navigates our frog pond using the final beta version of NCSA Mosaic (from around 1996) is like operating a working time machine. It proves one thing: True HTML survives decades.

A reverent cheer to the pioneers of the internet!

Your FrogFind Team 🐸

#retrocomputing #vintagecomputing #search #searchengine #frogFind #sgi #unix #netscape #navigator #irix

Catch of the Day: The Jurassic Park Workstation! 🦖🖥️

Hey Retro Fans!

Hold on to your UNIX manuals, because today our FrogFind radar detected an absolute Hollywood star in the frog pond. Between the usual handhelds and Windows PCs, this breathtaking identifier suddenly appeared:

Netscape Navigator 4.75C-SGI on SGI IRIX!

For those who weren't in IT in the 90s: SGI stands for Silicon Graphics Inc. and IRIX was their proprietary UNIX operating system. SGI workstations (like the legendary Indigo2 or O2) were incredibly expensive, highly specialized graphics monsters. It was on exactly these machines that the dinosaurs for Jurassic Park, the liquid Terminator in T2, and even the hardware architecture for the Nintendo 64 were developed!

The fact that these Hollywood heavyweights came with their own specially customized version of the Netscape Navigator (the "C-SGI" at the end) straight from the manufacturer was standard back then. The fact that today, over 25 years later, a retro enthusiast boots up one of these UNIX legends, loads the IRIX OS, and surfs through our frog pond using the original SGI Netscape is retro computing at the absolute highest level.

Cheers to the Silicon Graphics workstations—may your MIPS processors calculate forever!

Your FrogFind Team 🐸

#retrocomputing #vintagecomputing #search #searchengine #frogFind #ibm #os2 #firefox #mozilla

Catch of the Day: The OS that tried to beat Windows! 🏢🔵

Hey Retro Fans!
Hold on to your floppy disks, because the FrogFind radar has caught a true piece of computing history today. Among all the Nintendos and old Macs, an operating system appeared that will make IT veterans immediately nod in respect: OS/2!

Our bouncer logged this fabulous guest:
Mozilla Firefox 48.0 running on OS/2

For the younger frogs in the pond: OS/2 was developed jointly by IBM and Microsoft in the late 80s and was intended to be the successor to DOS. It was technically superior, and its stable multitasking was a dream! But then Microsoft released Windows 3.1 and later Windows 95, the partnership shattered, and IBM's "better Windows" lost the great war for home computers.

The fact that today, in 2026, someone is browsing the web with OS/2 (probably via a modern continuation like ArcaOS or eComStation) and a specifically ported Firefox 48 is pure, unbridled love for the platform. OS/2 lives, and it uses FrogFind!

Cheers to the OS/2 Warp veterans!

Your FrogFind Team 🐸

#retrocomputing #vintagecomputing #search #searchengine #frogFind #nintendo #ds #homebrew #bunjalloo

Catch of the Day: Homebrew Heroes on the DS! 🛠️🎮

Hey Retro Fans!

Our Nintendo faction in the Frog pond is famously huge. Normally, we see the official "Nintendo DS Browser" (which was based on Opera and required a bulky RAM expansion cartridge in the GBA slot back in the day). But today, our radar caught a true exotic: Bunjalloo 0.12.0 on the Nintendo DS!

What is Bunjalloo? It’s an unofficial, entirely fan-made web browser for the original Nintendo DS console. To use it, you have to equip your console with a flashcart (like the legendary R4) and run the software as "homebrew."

Because Bunjalloo was programmed to be extremely resource-efficient to cope with the tiny RAM of the DS, it only understands the most basic HTML—no JavaScript, no CSS, and certainly no modern encryption. This makes FrogFind the absolutely perfect (and probably only) companion for this little tinkerer's browser in 2026!

It's fantastic to see the homebrew scene continuing to keep their old handhelds online so lovingly. Grab your styluses!

Your FrogFind Team 🐸

#retrocomputing #vintagecomputing #search #searchengine #frogFind #AROS #Amiga #OdysseyWebBrowser #Odyssey

Catch of the Day: The Spirit of the Amiga Lives On! 🦋💾

Hey Retro Fans!
Anyone who thinks the era of Commodore and the legendary AmigaOS is long gone hasn't reckoned with our FrogFind radar. Today we caught an exotic guest in the frog pond that proves: Legends never die, they just recompile!

Our bouncer welcomed this fantastic entry:
Mozilla/5.0 (AROS x86_64; Odyssey Web Browser; rv:2.1) ...

What we are looking at here is AROS (AROS Research Operating System). This is not an emulator, but a completely independent, open-source operating system that has recreated the APIs of the classic AmigaOS 3.1 from scratch—designed to run natively and lightning-fast on modern x86_64 PC processors! Booting AROS brings that unmistakable, lightweight Amiga feeling straight to a modern machine.

And what do you use to browse the web? The Odyssey Web Browser (OWB), of course, the absolute undisputed champion of "next-gen" Amiga-like systems (such as MorphOS, AmigaOS 4, and AROS). The fact that someone boots up their alternative, enthusiast operating system and deliberately navigates to FrogFind shows just how deeply rooted our search engine has become in the scene.

Cheers to the alternative operating system community! May your Guru Meditation always stay away.

Your FrogFind Team 🐸

#retrocomputing #vintagecomputing #search #searchengine #frogFind #novell #netware #icebrowser

Catch of the Day: Surfing in the Server Room! 🦖💾

Hey Retro Fans and IT Veterans!

Sometimes our FrogFind radar catches exotics that make even hardcore system administrators rub their eyes in disbelief. Forget old handhelds or consoles—today we are diving deep into the flickering neon lights of the corporate server rooms of the early 2000s.

Our bouncer logged this majestic user agent:
Mozilla/5.0 (NetWare; U; NetWare 6.50.08; en-US) ICEbrowser/6.1.2 NovellViewPort/3.7.2

For anyone who entered IT after 1995: We are talking about Novell NetWare 6.5! This was not a system for browsing or gaming. NetWare was the undisputed file and print server operating system that practically kept every corporate network running back in the day. An absolute workhorse.

But how does a NetWare server end up on FrogFind? The answer lies in the ICEbrowser tag. To display help files or the "Novell Remote Manager" directly at the server rack on the graphical emergency console, Novell had embedded a tiny, Java-written browser from ICEsoft. It was never intended to explore the open World Wide Web!

The fact that now, over 20 years later, someone is literally (or via remote connection) sitting in front of this server legend, opening the graphical console, hijacking the rudimentary Java help viewer, and using it to ping FrogFind is absolute top-tier retro computing. FrogFind delivers even to this pure server operating system the bare HTML it needs to read today's world.

Cheers to the unknown admin keeping this server alive! May your disk arrays never fail.

Your FrogFind Team 🐸

#retrocomputing #vintagecomputing #search #searchengine #frogFind #novell #netware #icebrowser

Sneak Peek of tomorrow’s article :

gopher://gopher.retrocomputing.at/1/blog/2026-05-02-NetwareFrogfind

#retrocomputing #vintagecomputing #search #searchengine #frogFind #mac #macos #internetexplorer #internetexplorer5

Catch of the Day: A Beta Look Back! 🍏🔍

Hey Retro Fans!

Today, the FrogFind radar caught a true software fossil that will make Apple historians' eyes light up: Internet Explorer 5.0b1 on a Mac!

Wait... b1? Exactly! The "b1" stands for Beta 1. We are not talking about the regular Internet Explorer 5 for the Mac (which was released in 2000 and, with its revolutionary Tasman engine, was the best Mac browser for a long time). No, this is an unfinished, shaky test version (Beta 1) from the summer or fall of 1999!

Whoever is running this machine today probably popped in an old "Macworld" magazine CD, installed this pre-release version, and is happily surfing through the Frog pond. Such leaks and early beta builds are often full of amusing bugs, placeholder graphics, and unfinished rendering routines. But FrogFind is tough and serves up the finest, most digestible HTML even to this beta relic.

We love it when you dig deep into your software archives!

Your FrogFind Team 🐸