Floodgap

Yeah, bitlbee rocks, I use it under an i386 OpenBSD netbook (Atom CPU), it's much faster than Pidgin. Also, I use m68.news everywhere, as it can be read with no issues.

Lynx on Gopher protocol will work "as is" for Mac OS 7 I guess, and it's very fast.
68k.news it's over HTTP and not HTTPS, so it will work as is too.

This is the most recent version http://www.floodgap.com/retrotech/mac/lynx/download.html

The interface it's weird and not so Mac like, I know, but it will fly for sure.
And, well, you have Turbo Gopher too, but for your Mac version you would need the Threading extension.

Gopher URL for Lynx:

gopher://gopher.floodgap.com/1/gopher/clients/mac

Proxied for the rest of machines (send it to the Classic Mac via AppleTalk or FTP or whatever).

https://gopherproxy.meulie.net/gopher.floodgap.com/1/gopher/clients/mac

Gopher it's the perfect "web" for your legacy mac in order to find alternative
media. No ads, no trackers no MB sized pages.
You can even find news mirrors with ease.

For instance:
gopher://magical.fish:70/1/news

Recommended portal for lots of Gopher "holes":
gopher://magical.fish

Blog aggregator:
gopher://i-logout.cz:70/1/bongusta/

Old software for classic Macs
gopher://i-logout.cz:70/1/software/Apple/Software_MacOS

As you can see, if you can connect to the internet your Mac, you are far from obsolete. You can chat over IRC+Bitlbee to a big chunk of protocols, browse news, read "phlogs" from tech people, and even visit HN and Reddit over…

This site is specifically targeted to software engineers, so it's a reasonable assumption that we can talk about the relevant topics without having to simplify things for people outside that group.

For a reverse proxy, you would want a computer capable of the encryption methods the modern web's security standards demand and to install a web server on it which you can access from the older computer. The server computer does not have to be fancy at all. A Raspberry Pi can do it. For software I would recommend either Caddy (https://caddyserver.com/docs/quick-starts/reverse-proxy) or NGINX (https://docs.nginx.com/nginx/admin-guide/web-server/reverse-proxy/). It can be rather complicated and difficult for someone to do, especially if you're not a web programmer.

If both that and upgrading your computer aren't in the cards at the moment, I would think using the recently-discontinued browser Classilla is your best bet: http://www.floodgap.com/software/classilla/ It at least supports some deprecated forms of TLS & SSL. I hear there's a fork called Phoenix that kind of supports TLS 1.2 even.

(I would recommend using the most updated browser regardless.)

Chrome doesn't run on Mavericks, but Firefox does. I can't say how long that will last, but I can look at what's available on even older versions of OS X as a guide:

Mountain Lion and Lion can run Firefox Legacy, which is just a lightly edited branch of mainline Firefox: https://parrotgeek.com/fxlegacy.html

Snow Leopard can run ArcticFox: https://github.com/wicknix/Arctic-Fox

And Tiger and Leopard can run TenFourFox: http://www.floodgap.com/software/tenfourfox/

ArcticFox and TenFourFox don't quite have 100% compatibility, so they wouldn't be ideal, but they're still very usable.

So while browser support is definitely my biggest concern, I suspect there will continue to be options. It's also worth mentioning that the reason Firefox hard can't run on Snow Leopard or below is because Rust doesn't work below 10.7. Yet another possibility is running Google Chrome in Wineskin.

For Adobe, I'm stuck on CS6 anyway because I'm never paying for Creative Cloud. And I'm increasingly eying the Serif suite, which supports Mavericks.

That is what the Apple/NeXT combined company did, of course. Rhapsody showed it well.

http://toastytech.com/guis/rhap.html

And there's some description of the emulation nanokernel:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_nanokernel

But in its way OS X was much more of a clean break: a whole new OS, ported to the old hardware, tweaked to understand filesystems and file formats and given a shallow cosmetic resemblance.

A/UX was a much tighter integrated system. Some of the OS functionality was provided by actual classic MacOS.

What was left, if that was removed, was a fairly unremarkable Unix for its time. You could even boot it in a sort of vanilla-Unix form.

You can compare and contrast here:

https://www.aux-penelope.com/screenshots.htm

E.g. for v3, top 2 rows (pics 1-6) are in Mac mode, bottom row (7-9) are in Unix mode. A bit like the ANS with AIX, there's little to appeal to Apple users here:

https://www.floodgap.com/retrobits/ans/aix.html

For one, all x86 malware fails instantly. That's why some people I knew who wouldn't be targeted more specifically were still on PowerPC Macs. Their software was fine for their use case. I have one for experiments from 2003 that ran YouTube fine with a bit of lag a year or two ago. Although I used default, there's even still a browser for it:

https://www.floodgap.com/software/tenfourfox/

People who use a lot of terminal apps that don't need a full-on browser or non-portable apps can use it to its fullest. Most importantly besides owner-controlled, the fact that you're getting to use, show off, and develop on a unique system nobody else in your area probably has. Let's not forget the novelty and awing people aspect of tech that might sell some of these.

I would say 5-6 years tops. The only advantage that kept a bit longer was as TV titler using Scala because of the 15KHz output it could produce directly.

The main trouble with Commodore was management: they had a few strokes of luck on which they monetised, but they didn't really have a vision, hence those ill-advised machines both in the 8bit and 16bit series. They also underpaid their engineers, which didn't exactly help in keeping up with bigger competitors.

I read somewhere that Jack Tramiel was amazed that people had emotional attachment to his products: to him selling calculators, typewriters or toys was all the same.

Note: Pre-Amiga, but you can see some of their less-known computers here: https://www.floodgap.com/retrobits/ckb/secret .