Making the Internet Work on a Computer That Was Built Before the Internet Was a Thing
The "i" in iMac (and iPhone, and iOS, and iPad) stands for internet.
When Steve Jobs introduced the iMac in 1998, getting people online was such a big deal that Apple decided to name the entire computer after it.
Apple had already been making Macintosh computers for fourteen years by that point. The original Macintosh came out in 1984, followed by the Macintosh 512K, Macintosh Plus, and a whole bunch of other computers that knew nothing about the World Wide Web.
I recently got my hands on a Macintosh Plus, released in 1986, with 1 MB of RAM, an 8 MHz processor, no Ethernet, & no Wi-Fi. Surprisingly, you can actually get these things online. It's certainly not fast or practical, but thanks to a fantastic open-source project called BlueSCSI, you can give a forty-year-old Macintosh a Wi-Fi connection.
Unfortunately, modern websites are rather complicated. They use JavaScript, encryption, enormous images, video, and all sorts of things that a computer from the 80's with 4 MB of RAM has little hope of understanding.
The solution is to put another computer in the middle, called a proxy, that translates all the complicated stuff on the modern internet and sends back something the Macintosh can actually understand.
So that's what we're going to do.