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DOS Internet... Kickass!

M

MoonShadow

Experienced Member
Joined
Jan 28, 2006
Messages
52
Location
Sydney, NSW, Australia
I've been looking at stuff to get old 3 and 486en on the net for a while now.
So far I think the best options for getting IBM-Compatibles online are as follows:


1- A full version of QNX (*nix-based, not free)

2- Lynx for DOS or Bobcat (text-only) www.fdisk.com/doslynx

3- Arachne (Nice graphical browser, if you can get it to work)

4- If the system has >8meg of RAM, a 1-floppy distro of linux.

There are a few other browsers for DOS that I didn't feel were worth mentioning.
If you hunt around www.fdisk.com you can find them.


By the way, this was posted using a win32 port of Lynx. Yay!

MoonShadow
 
MoonShadow said:
I've been looking at stuff to get old 3 and 486en on the net for a while now.
So far I think the best options for getting IBM-Compatibles online are as follows:


1- A full version of QNX (*nix-based, not free)

2- Lynx for DOS or Bobcat (text-only) www.fdisk.com/doslynx

3- Arachne (Nice graphical browser, if you can get it to work)

4- If the system has >8meg of RAM, a 1-floppy distro of linux.

There are a few other browsers for DOS that I didn't feel were worth mentioning.
If you hunt around www.fdisk.com you can find them.


By the way, this was posted using a win32 port of Lynx. Yay!

MoonShadow
Click to expand...

I remember when you could get QNX (x86) for free. I guess some suit at the company realized that "Hey, all these nerds are downloading our QNX x86 offering, perhaps we can make money off of it!", and promptly closed down that channel. Too bad, because I have an older machine I'd like to run QNX on. Perhaps I still have a CD with one of the older versions laying around ...

Getting "on-line" can mean different things. For the first two years I had Internet connectivity (1994 and 1995, I believe), I had a dial-up shell account on a Unix box (386BSD, actually) from my 486 at home, running DOS/Windows 3.11. I used ProComm Plus for Windows, and had a blast! I read my email using Pine, surfed the web using Links, and spent more time telnetting around the Internet then I did surfing. You might still be able to find a provider that gives this kind of service.

Frankly, I could live without a graphical browser. In fact, I could live without a GUI on my computer what so ever. I spend most of my days in either a DOS command prompt (for work) or a Linux xterm (for fun).
 
Re: DOS Internet... Kickass!

I just had a thought: I'm surrounded by Linux computers here at the house, and they all are connected to the Internet via a hard-wired 100 Mb/s network. Using the same principles as the dial-up account I mentioned in my previous post to this thread, does it sound feasable to connect an old DOS computer up to one of my Linux computers, using a null modem cable? It would take a bit of setting up on the Linux side, but you should be able to connect using pretty much any DOS communications program, like Procomm Plus.

This would give you a console-only connection to the Internet via the Linux machine. Hmmm, I'm going to have to think on this one a bit. Sounds like another fine way to waste my valuable time! :)

This could possibly work for vintage micro-computers as well. I guess the only requirement would be it have a serial port and a modem program.
 
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I don't think that QNX was ever free. QNX is a well regarded real-time operating system. The 'OS on diskette' thing was a demonstration only.
 
mbbrutman said:
I don't think that QNX was ever free. QNX is a well regarded real-time operating system. The 'OS on diskette' thing was a demonstration only.
Click to expand...

No, I have to disagree with you. QNX used to offer a free CD ISO image download for "personal" use. In fact, I actually managed to dig out the one-and-only CD I have remaining. When I burn a CD-R, I always write the date on it. The date on this CD-R is 08/01/2002, and it is for QNX RTOS 6.2.
 
I stand corrected on the free part. Free for personal use is fine by me.

You should make that available somehow ...
 
mbbrutman said:
I stand corrected on the free part. Free for personal use is fine by me.

You should make that available somehow ...
Click to expand...

Way ahead of you man! I made an ISO image from the CD and zipped it down. Unfortunately, the zipped file is still a bit over 171 MB in size. I am going to transfer it to my work website, and I will provide a link to download it.

I don't know what the rules about this sort of thing are on this forum, so if you're interested, PM me and I'll send the link. One other thing, I don't want to get in trouble with QNX, so let's not tell everyone and their brother about this ;-)
 
Null Modem cables...

Null Modem cables...

I haven't ever used a null modem cable (yet; I'm building one now), so I wouldn't know a great deal about that. It does sound feasible, however.

I just checked recently, and QNX has apparently become free free for development purposes. I'm checking it out now.

An OS switch has been in the works for me for a while now, because I still haven't changed computers from the absolute POS shared laptop that I use now.

Reasons why shared laptop is a POS:
- It's shared.
- It's running winblows.
- Windows is broken on it. (No taskbar)
- Screen res only 1024x768.
- Its fans sound like a jet engine. AND THEY NEVER TURN OFF!!!
- It burns. (Mmmm. Heater.)
- Small hard drive (about 9 gig).
- CD drive dodgy and not a burner.
- Not enough RAM (128 MB).
- Processor slow (P3 celeron, 1.2 GHz).

That should be enough for most people.
As soon as I get a better laptop, I'm going to THROW THIS PIECE OF CRAP AT THE WALL!!!

Or give it to my sister. Same thing.

Oh yeah. My Macintosh monitor recently blew up. Anyone have a spare?

Bye for now,

MoonShadow
 
Sounds like a problem with explorer.exe running, or maybe the executable itself corrupted... (It always seems to crash on my Centrino Duo laptop, but thankfully Microsoft was smart enough to program Windows to restart explorer.exe every time it crashes :p)

Anyways, back to talking about DOS Internet & whatnot...
 
I have been looking for something quick to put on some antiques, QNX would be the ticket, once one is posted that should save me a headache, thanx Ryan
 
Qnx

Qnx

I have both the modem and the network versions of the demo floppy.
Which one would you like?
PM me and I'll email it to you.

Once I can be bothered to get off my ass, I'll start a web page with these and some other handy downloads on.
Bye for now.

MoonShadow
 
I don't know what you'r talking about, but I have QNX ver from 09/23/97 on 1 floppy.

If someone is interested just tell me ;).
 
QNX floppy

QNX floppy

I'm interested! Do you have WinImage or a similar disk-imaging program on your computer (I'm assuming you use Windoze)?


If not, download it and make an image of the disk.
It would be advisable to write-protect the disk first. in case anything goes wrong.

EDIT: If anyone wants the most recent (I think) QNX demodisks, they're now downloadable at my page:

bluemoon.shadow.googlepages.com
 
OK, I uploaded it here:

http://www.ibmxt.cba.pl/upload/qnx.rar

It's not really from floppy, but from PCW.
Was filed under 'full wersions', but I don't know if it's full or demo.
I'am going to test it now, it's self-extracting image.

It's only demo version :(.
 
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I remember using Arachne. It was a pain to set up, but one I've got it started, I was surfing on a 486DX 40 at full speed :D Nice interface, too...
 
I used to have a couple of DOS machines on my network. They each had a NIC (and associated packet driver) plus one of the following programs: NCSA Telnet, DOS Lynx or something called "Minuet" which did email, netnews, FTP and some other stuff.

It's still possible to find this stuff on the net, typically on various European sites.
 
I have a question... Can i use on my old Hyundai an IRC programm? Can i share my DSL on it without Lan card? With Serial port connected to a pc with DSL?
 
aquasonic said:
I have a question... Can i use on my old Hyundai an IRC programm? Can i share my DSL on it without Lan card? With Serial port connected to a pc with DSL?
Click to expand...

you can absolutely use an IRC client on it. none of the DOS clients out there are any good, honestly. i am working on a DOS client of my own... i'll try to prepare a stable test version for you tonight if you want to try it.

and yes you can use serial to share the internet connection by using the SLIP or PPP protocol. there are plenty of SLIP/PPP packet drivers out there that work just like a standard ethernet packet driver and should be compatible with any TCP stack TSR's such as wattcp.

i would highly reccommend using parallel instead of serial since it would be faster. here is a great parallel port packet driver with ethernet emulation:

http://www.crynwr.com/drivers/plip.zip

i hope this helps!
 
MoonShadow said:
Reasons why shared laptop is a POS:
- It's shared.
- It's running winblows.
- Windows is broken on it. (No taskbar)
- Screen res only 1024x768.
- Its fans sound like a jet engine. AND THEY NEVER TURN OFF!!!
- It burns. (Mmmm. Heater.)
- Small hard drive (about 9 gig).
- CD drive dodgy and not a burner.
- Not enough RAM (128 MB).
- Processor slow (P3 celeron, 1.2 GHz).
Click to expand...

lol, so what is it... a P3 or a Celeron?

man... that's not too horrible of a machine. it's faster than my laptop. i've got a sony vaio with a P3 750 MHz. at least it has a DVD drive though. (no burning)

and i purchased a new western digital 60 GB hard disk for it last year to replace its crappy 16 GB drive, which was annoyingly loud to begin with. (cost me f***ing $180 US)

only complaint i have with it is RAM... only 128 MB. i might switch that out for a 512 MB chip some day if i feel like it... although i might as well just get a new laptop for just a couple hundred bucks more, eh? heh... upgrading laptops is usually a big waste of cash.
 
Apprently you can get Free-DOS to access the internet too, this is something I have yet to get working myself (and the full distro even comes with various internet programs and utils), but that could be because I'm trying to use it in VirtualPC rather then on a real PC, and during the installation it stalls trying to find my DHCP server on my network.

Might be worth a try for anyone else who is interested.

http://www.freedos.org
 
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