Secure web
Your Apple II talks to real HTTPS APIs directly. The card runs the whole TLS handshake and verifies the certificate; the host only ever sees plaintext.
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The story
It started with apps, not a card.
It began with building things for these machines: a Bitcoin miner, then a modern LLM chat client for the Apple IIGS. Each one ran into the same wall: the modern internet's cryptography simply can't run on a 1 MHz 6502 or a 2.8 MHz 65816. There are already good answers to that. Some run the real program on another computer and leave the Apple as a terminal. Others, like the excellent FujiNet, put a dedicated device on the disk port that has been terminating TLS for vintage machines for years, with the Apple still running the show. Offloading the hard cryptography is the right idea, and CoGS stands squarely on that prior art. What I wanted was a different shape for it: not a helper beside the machine but a true card inside a slot — bus-native, with direct memory access and a co-processor the program can call in a few register writes. The Apple still owns the program, the screen, and every decision. The card just does the parts the silicon of 1986 never could.
What made it feasible was modern tooling. Designing the protocol, writing the firmware, and bringing up the clients with AI-assisted development in Cursor turned what would once have been years into an iterative, almost playful loop — sketch an idea in the morning, have it answering on real silicon by the afternoon. That speed is the point: it unlocks the imagination to actually ship working software for a forty-year-old computer.
So much of the hard groundwork was already laid by this community — the bus interface, the TCP/IP stacks, the toolchains — that the next step felt obvious: build one card that drops into any slotted Apple, with a whole suite of capability on board, to empower the next wave of software and keep our favorite computers alive long into the 21st century (and beyond).