What the EEVBlog forum looks like to a 486

[Ampera]

Now I could of course do other things like install Windows 98SE and put as modern of a browser I can on there, and maybe with a lot of waiting, hemming, and/or hawing, I could do something crazy like make a post, but I'm not gonna do that. I'm using Netscape Navigator 4.08 which has "support" for "JavaScript" (not by any modern means).

Either way, Telnet works. Thanks to Halcyon for sending me the ethernet card to do this, it's really neat to look at my router's management panel and see 486DX4 on there.

Any requests?

[Halcyon]

You're welcome. I have fond memories of primary school where we had one computer in the library with a dial-up connection to the Internet, this was early 1990's. Back then, there was no "Dial-up Networking" in Windows, you had to dial the ISP using Trumpet Winsock.

There was also something very satisfying about seeing that "Host contacted. Waiting for reply..." message, knowing you're connecting to something on the other side of the world.

[Ampera]

I'm currently going to try the Arachne web browser which is directly a DOS web browser. Also, the bttfbbs didn't like Windows 3.11's telnet client, so I'm going to try a DOS based one instead

[T3sl4co1l]

I forget if I ever tried EEVBlog on my Pentium (W95); it's only got a half-broken IE3 or 4 on it, so its view of the modern web is pretty piecemeal.

Google search still works, amazingly.

Tim

[vk6zgo]

You're welcome. I have fond memories of primary school where we had one computer in the library with a dial-up connection to the Internet, this was early 1990's. Back then, there was no "Dial-up Networking" in Windows, you had to dial the ISP using Trumpet Winsock.

There was also something very satisfying about seeing that "Host contacted. Waiting for reply..." message, knowing you're connecting to something on the other side of the world.

My Goodness, you are but a stripling lad!
I thought you were an old fart like me!

When I was in Primary School, the nearest computer was probably at the CSIRO or somewhere like that, If there even was one in Oz at all!

[frozenfrogz]

If I remember correctly, there are DOS builds for the Lynx browser

[Halcyon]

My Goodness, you are but a stripling lad!
I thought you were an old fart like me!

I feel old! Being 30-something in gay years is akin to being a pensioner. ;-)

[dexters_lab]

lol, yea that brings back some memories!

back in the early 90s i worked for a software company that made apps for Unix (as in proper AT&T Unix and most of the licensees) and Windows. One of the company owners had a hand in the Winsock API so we had the internet very early for a company in the UK at the time. The only people i knew to email was the other staff in the Californian office!

[frozenfrogz]

I remember my dad as he illegally imported and used a ZyXel 56.000 baud modem back in the BTX and UseNet days.
At that time the only legal modem certified to be used in the German telecommunications network was 9.600 baud and you could get some more throughput via data compression - Deutsche Post was in charge of everything communications related back then.

Edit: BTX is a German service for screen text communication. The Brits called it PRESTEL, the French Minitel.

[Ampera]

I always found it interesting how the German telecommunications industry stemmed from the postal service. In the US, of course, most of our telecommunications started with dedicated telegram/graph companies, and exploded with AT&T and the Bell System. Most of our telecommunications companies (with the exception of German Telecommunications and maybe a few others) are almost all direct descendants from the Bell monopoly.

I need to get back onto learning German. I'm about half German, and have a lot of reason to learn the language. I know the basics, I just need a better grasp on the minute aspects of the grammar, and then it's just all nuances and vocabulary.

[frozenfrogz]

Although having pioneered in lots of technical disciplines in the past - right now, Germany is so far behind in terms of mobile networks and fiber optic or broadband in general. Also there are no suitable plans for a (EU wide) decent power grid that makes sense for renewable energy.
So much loss on the innovative front
I could go on and whine about politicians bowing to corporations instead of focusing on education and a bright future...

Back on topic:
I love how it was a challenge to get games to run under DOS! That was a mini quest on its own, needing to stack drivers in the right order to fit into lower memory where every byte counts.
You want to use your joystick AND have sound from your Soundblaster card at the same time? Better find a smaller driver for the joystick or ditch the mouse in order to make it work

[Ampera]

DOS memory management is a load of shit, but it's a load of shit that tastes like chocolate pudding!

I actually had an interesting issue. I, for shits and/or giggles, installed 96MB of RAM into my 486 because I had the FPM DRAM lying around and wanted to see if it would even work in a 32+32+32 configuration (it did, of course, just need one more 32mb stick to max my board). This actually caused some strange things to happen with not only a few poorly coded Windows 3.1 apps (which is honestly expected), but Tyrian, the classic shmup, actually restarted the computer just by launching it. A strange workaround was to enable EMS support on EMM386, but that completely hogged up the UMB, and stole all my conventional memory making any game that relied on a lot of it (Like Civ 1) stop working. Of course the real solution is stop trying to be funny and remove 64MB of the memory. I'll put it back in if I need to use something like OS/2, Linux, or WinNT/9x.


If you think Germany is behind on innovation in terms of telecommunications, 90/90 is considered ungodly fast in much of the US. Gigabit connections are such an amazing luxury here, you are actually lucky if you move to a different part of a city to get one.

Fiber? HAH! Some places have touch tone dialing as their most technologically advanced telecommunications feature. I don't think there are still any pulse dialing switches still alive though.

Don't forget, you can boil a kettle without tripping a 15A 120v breaker as well. No time like the present to feel good about nations that are in the past.

[dexters_lab]

i remember having multiple dos boot profiles for all the different ways to configure memory for games, it was a nightmare!

incidentally the telecoms / postal service was the same in the UK before BT (British Telecom) was separated. You can still find telephone manhole covers with GPO imprinted on them (General Post Office)

[james_s]

My first exposure to the internet as I recall was in the library of the local community college my friend was going to while I was in highschool. I remember quite comfortably surfing on a 486-33 running Netscape under what was probably Win95.

There is certainly some cool stuff on the modern web, but I have to say in terms of just general information exchange such as forums, photos and accompanying text, there is something to be said for the late 90s style websites. Simple, effective, none of this bring a modern multi-core machine to its knees running dozens of scripts doing who knows what. The average website today is horrendously bloated.

[IanMacdonald]

There is certainly some cool stuff on the modern web, but I have to say in terms of just general information exchange such as forums, photos and accompanying text, there is something to be said for the late 90s style websites. Simple, effective, none of this bring a modern multi-core machine to its knees running dozens of scripts doing who knows what. The average website today is horrendously bloated.

Agree. The insistence on using a bloated CMS is part of the problem. Although, the drive to make HTTPS and certificates compulsory will more or less spell the end to a free, open Web. It will mean that older platforms simply cannot decrypt the encrypted communications, as some are already finding with the banning of SHA1. It will also mean that your very right to have a website at all, will be determined by the certificate-issuer cartel. A cartel which have shown just how heavy-handed it can be in deactivating certificates because the issuer broke some obscure rule, regardless of the damage done to the certificate purchasers.

Of course, all of this is for our own good. Without HTTPS, we'd be sitting ducks for every hacker on the planet.

[james_s]

IMHO HTTPS should be mandatory for financial stuff and highly recommended for anything involving credentials or private information, but I see no reason to require it in general. If someone is posting or accessing publicly available information there is little reason to try to prevent evesdropping.

[SparkyFX]

If someone is posting or accessing publicly available information there is little reason to try to prevent evesdropping.

It is not only that.
HTTPS
- makes it a little harder for spammers/bots to login to a service or hijack a session
- it does effectively bypass caching in proxies
- (therefore) improves session handling for client and server side

Some of these things get relevant for applications with lots of users concurrently logged in, as some implementations running over HTTP will show stability issues only under high load. But thats just from my bit of experience.

If I remember correctly, there are DOS builds for the Lynx browser

w3m ftw., i prefer using it through putty. But yeah running them over cygwin does it too.

[Ampera]

Well if I wanted to cheat I could VNC into a modern machine and do whatever I wanted. over a 10mbps connection....

[cdev]

This is what surfing the net in the early 90s was like.

My first connections to the net were all text based and were a lot like the BBSs at the time, there was a sort of gradual transition from locally connected BBSs (I still remember them with a lot of nostalgia.. they were really fun) to "internet"via Unix systems that conected via UUCP.. so email was quite circuitous, using long "bang path" addresses.. .

My first Internet browser was a program called "www" but it was buggy as hell. So I switched to lynx which was also text based. (thats all there was at the time) One of my coolest memories is discovering a nifty program called "TIA" which allowed you to turn a dial up account into a full fledged net connection, via some kind of multiplexing magic. I also was a big user of "screen" which was similar except with a shell. (I still use it sometimes)

With TIA (a close relative of "slirp", I think thats the correct spelling) I could use Mac Mosaic. Which supported pictures.


It does seem an awfully long time ago.

[kaz911]

I ran a BBS - Wild Willy's - named after a popular Jeep .. at peak 8 lines in running Opus I seem to remember.

hourly mail / forum / file exchanges with Asgaard and a few others. So one could mail someone in the US and it only took 6-8 hours to get there and 6-8 hours more to get a reply!

[kultakala]

I finally got my ols Toshiba T5200 from 1988 running with a new floppy, Flash IDE disk and a Cyrix upgrade processor (486 core) from 1992.
I bought it used a couple of years ago in a near mint condition, only the floppy drive did not work.
With 3Com LAN card it is possible to open the EEVblog with Opera 3.62 on Windows 3.11 but...  loading the page, even with image loading turned off, takes 5 minutes and is not really usable 

On the Plasma Screen it looks like this:




Via VGA output on my 32 Inch LCD it looks this way:

[Ampera]

I'm gonna have to try that out later. Were you able to make a post?

[kultakala]

No, there is also a problem with a certificate and with some non-working scripts.
I will try with a different browser, but...  its really no fun, way too slow.

[Ampera]

Then again, my 120mhz DX4 is likely faster than your 1992-era 486. I could easily step the generation up and go to my Pentium Pro or Pentium MMX and get it all working no problem, but then it isn't as cool.

[Bud]

I finally got my ols Toshiba T5200 from 1988 running with a new floppy, Flash IDE disk and a Cyrix upgrade processor (486 core) from 1992.
I bought it used a couple of years ago in a near mint condition, only the floppy drive did not work.
With 3Com LAN card it is possible to open the EEVblog with Opera 3.62 on Windows 3.11 but...  loading the page, even with image loading turned off, takes 5 minutes and is not really usable 

On the Plasma Screen it looks like this:

Oh no! Bring tears to my eyes! I had one, loved the screen, nothing can compare with plasma screen sharpness.