HTTPS on MacOS 9? Certainly

I learned Applesoft BASIC when I was five. MS BASIC on the Mac, also when I was five. But it wasn't until college that I really learned another language (the almost-ANSI standard C++, thank you Deitel & Deitel). In the time between, whether due to lack of drive or my inability to find any good books on Macintosh Programming in Arkansas in the early 90s, I didn't venture far from BASIC programming. I figured out how to use ResEdit to tinker with menu names and change icons, but I never reached out for another language to do real programming.

Time to make up for lost.. time.

I've decided I want to make native Classic Mac applications that talk to remote APIs over HTTPS. I want to tie old coding techniques with current services. Unfortunately for MacOS 9.2.2 the internet has mostly gone dark. The TLS protocol that secures most internet traffic is not natively supported. You either need a proxy or you need to roll your own TLS. I decided to use Claude Code the build the latter.

After a bit of Googling and superpower planning, I built a library that incorporated BearSSL's native C implementation of TLS 1.2, add 1.3 support, and use it with OpenTransport to communicate.

Here's the repo.. I call it Certainly. Use it with Claude Code to make HTTPS apps in MacOS 9.

Next up: I use Certainly to build a Claude Code client.