[Hardware Question] What is the minamum hardware needed to run gemini

While in theory 'snythingbthst can display a terminal's is a good gemeni
candidate, there is the problem of what it takes to run tls encode/decode.
So thebwudtion splits between what is a minamum to run gemini by itself.
And whstbeoukd need an external device to act as mediation
ksyervrorvenceyption? Example being that wifi to serial adaptor for retro
hardware, but instead of just wifi, it handling the tls and either
translating Gemini to gopher, or to a retro client that seeks a handshake
from the dogkevso it knows not to even bother with encryption.

This is Simi personal curiosity Simi 'worldvwhere the 90s internet took a
different path as one of the ways the world isn't the same' and Gemini fits
a lot of my wants list for that project.

On Tue, 8 Jun 2021 20:22:40 -0500
Andrew Singleton <singletona082@gmail.com> wrote:

> While in theory 'snythingbthst can display a terminal's is a good
> gemeni candidate, there is the problem of what it takes to run tls
> encode/decode. So thebwudtion splits between what is a minamum to run
> gemini by itself. And whstbeoukd need an external device to act as
> mediation ksyervrorvenceyption? Example being that wifi to serial
> adaptor for retro hardware, but instead of just wifi, it handling the
> tls and either translating Gemini to gopher, or to a retro client
> that seeks a handshake from the dogkevso it knows not to even bother
> with encryption.
> 
> This is Simi personal curiosity Simi 'worldvwhere the 90s internet
> took a different path as one of the ways the world isn't the same'
> and Gemini fits a lot of my wants list for that project.

there a microcontroller you can buy with hardware crypto builtin for
pennies and crypto offload circuits you communicate with than implement
things like rsa or ecc over a SPI bus. You could run gemini on your
commodore pet probably with a setup like this, which would be useful to
have crypto offload in any IP networking cartridge for a retro
computer. High end server cards usually have this built in or via the
addition of 'cryptographic accelerators'. It's why we have standards
like AES so we can make hardware implementations of them.

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Not entirely sure, but I run mine on a Pi Zero. I imagine you could go
lower some.

Andrew Singleton writes:

> While in theory 'snythingbthst can display a terminal's is a good
> gemeni candidate, there is the problem of what it takes to run tls
> encode/decode.  So thebwudtion splits between what is a minamum to run
> gemini by itself. And whstbeoukd need an external device to act as
> mediation ksyervrorvenceyption? Example being that wifi to serial
> adaptor for retro hardware, but instead of just wifi, it handling the
> tls and either translating Gemini to gopher, or to a retro client that
> seeks a handshake from the dogkevso it knows not to even bother with
> encryption.

My *guess* is that, using real retro hardware, the minimum would be an
80386 or a 68020. OpenSSL will build for 386, but you have to specify
you want it at compile time, because the default x86 32-bit build
requires a 486.

Anything older than that, especially 8 or 16 bit micros, you'll need to
either use a TLS-terminating proxy on a modern small machine (like a Pi
Zero) that speaks either Gopher or a non-TLS Gemini variant (Mercury) to
the client, and Gemini to the server; or, as someone else suggested,
offload the TLS to a modern microcontroller somehow.

-- 
Jason McBrayer      | “Strange is the night where black stars rise,
jmcbray@carcosa.net | and strange moons circle through the skies,
                    | but stranger still is lost Carcosa.”
                    | ― Robert W. Chambers,The King in Yellow

Andrew Singleton writes:

> Did not know about the Mercury clients 9gemini minus crypto = mercury.
> Clever. Does make me wonder what an 'Apollo' would look like.
> Questions for later.)

The original analogy was that if Gopher was "Mercury" and HTTP was
"Apollo", then Gemini was trying to find the sweet spot between
them. Later, Solderpunk wrote up a "Mercury" spec as a kind of
argument/what-if, not as something that people should actually
implement. It's basically Gemini, but with no TLS, only one-character
response codes, and an even-more-simplified Gemtext that only includes
plain text and links as line types (no quotes, literals, or lists).

If I were actually going to implement a TLS-terminating Gemini proxy for
use with vintage computers, I'd probably have the client side speak
Gopher rather than encouraging people to actually implement Mercury.

-- 
Jason McBrayer      | “Strange is the night where black stars rise,
jmcbray@carcosa.net | and strange moons circle through the skies,
                    | but stranger still is lost Carcosa.”
                    | ― Robert W. Chambers,The King in Yellow

‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ Original Message ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐

On Wednesday, June 9th, 2021 at 07:40, Jason McBrayer <jmcbray@carcosa.net> wrote:

> My guess is that, using real retro hardware, the minimum would be an
> 80386 or a 68020. OpenSSL will build for 386, but you have to specify
> you want it at compile time, because the default x86 32-bit build
> requires a 486.

This makes me wonder if anybody's written a version for the 6502 or 6510.  It seems
like a thing that could be run on, say, a C64 (which is what I'm thinking).

> Anything older than that, especially 8 or 16 bit micros, you'll need to
> either use a TLS-terminating proxy on a modern small machine (like a Pi

Doable.

> Zero) that speaks either Gopher or a non-TLS Gemini variant (Mercury) to
> the client, and Gemini to the server; or, as someone else suggested,
> offload the TLS to a modern microcontroller somehow.

Or, maybe the core of a Zimodem running an ESP32 or ESP8266 
(https://github.com/bozimmerman/Zimodem)?

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