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Windows 3.1 and TCP/IP over Ethernet

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Pepinno

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I recently got a vintage laptop: Compaq LTE 5000, with a Pentium-75 CPU and 24 MB RAM, which I already have running Windows 3.1.

I would like this machine to have Internet connectivity (yes, I know Windows for Workgroups 3.11 and Windows NT 3.51 have already built-in TCP/IP stacks; but I have here this Windows 3.1 installation which I quite like).

I remember having Internet connectivity, 25 years ago, in an already obsolete laptop Texas Instruments TravelMate 3000, with Windows 3.1 and *only* 2 MB RAM - I used Forte Free Agent to read USENET, and some very old version of Netscape Navigator to browse some light web pages, and Pegasus Mail for email. It was slow but it worked; the Internet connectivity came thanks to Trumpet Winsock TCP/IP and dial-up through a modem attached to COM1. So I know it is doable.

However... now I don't have dial-up any more, so I guess I need the TCP/IP part of Trumpet Winsock, and then I also need some kind of ethernet driver support which Trumpet Winsock hopefully can attach to an use... So my question is: am I in the right track? How should I go about to get Internet connectivity in Windows 3.1 through an ethernet-based LAN instead of through dial-up?

Any help is extremely welcomed!
 
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Trouble is, most sites are HTTPS and will not work with an old browser and you won't be able to install a later secure browser.
 
Gary C said:
Trouble is, most sites are HTTPS and will not work with an old browser and you won't be able to install a later secure browser.
Click to expand...
I'm aware of that. I may install a HTTP Proxy on some Linux VM and terminate the HTTPS in that web proxy; also, there is more Internet that the web: telnet, IRC, SMTP, USENET, FTP...

I am worried about the layer-2 and layer-3 in OSI and Windows 3.1. The upper layers are solved problems.
 
Probably doesn't have a NIC onboard
Get a 3C589B PCMCIA card+"dongle", appropriate card services drivers for DOS and/or Win3.11 and a driver for the NIC.
The 589 is the PCMCIA version of the 3C509. If you are really lucky you might get one with the "combo" dongle - 10Base2 and 10BaseT in the same unit.
 
Caluser2000 said:
Windows for Workgroups 3.11 you mean right?
Click to expand...

I missed out that Pepinno wants to run 3.1. I'm not sure what networking components 3.1 has, if any. Disregard MS TCP-IP32 because it's a WfW only.

mdog69 said:
Probably doesn't have a NIC onboard
Get a 3C589B PCMCIA card+"dongle", appropriate card services drivers for DOS and/or Win3.11 and a driver for the NIC.
The 589 is the PCMCIA version of the 3C509. If you are really lucky you might get one with the "combo" dongle - 10Base2 and 10BaseT in the same unit.
Click to expand...

Yup, my bad, too old of a laptop to have it.
I think his options are DOS card services, DOS packet driver, verify it works (via mTCP, Arachne, Lynx, whatever).
Then put Winpkt on 3.1 to have them use the DOS driver, then install a stack like Trumpet Winsock.

There are some applications with embedded stacks for Windows 3.1. I don't know how many of them deal with LAN packet driver, they were mostly about serial port and dialup.

For the practical side of things, on a vintage Microsoft system the browsing can be done for pages that are expected to be visited by underpowered browsers. Like Winworldpc for instance. But once you get a file from there it will contain disk image(s). You are going to have hard time mounting those disk images directly on the machine. This is better done by doing everything on the normal PC, and transferring an archive that's easy to handle on the old PC. For e-mail, you might enable non-secure POP3/SMTP on your mail host, but is it worth it just to be able to access the mail from 30 year old computer? Or maybe better option is to have a mail relay daemon on a normal computer somewhere in a home network so you can connect your unsecure machine to it, and not the internet?

So direct mail is sketchy and direct "web experience" OK only for sites are built for old machines, both in presentation and in packaging of the downloads.

Things like usenet and IRC servers will be OK.

Btw. I run WfW 'online'. I can compare it as total beta of Windows 95 experience. Windows 95 online experience is OK. You can run a browser from 2010. That browser will still have to avoid SSL because it fails in it (not sure why, didn't bother to look), and it will have to avoid modern websites. So you go to a "old" website, you transfer some files over http, you fire up an arcane protocol client like IRC. That's the same stuff one will be doing on 3.1, just with way less of a stable OS beneath it.

IMO internet on old Windows for the sake of the internet is not worth it at all. But for the sake of work/play, yes. E.g. You want to do something on your Win 3.1 and you easily access remote resources helping you out via the network you set.
 
A Dos nic packet driver, Winnpkt and Trumpet Winsock works great on my Zenith 286LP Plus system. I transferred the Telnet and FTP programs and help files plain Windows 3.1x over from WfW 3.11 and they function just fine in plain Windows 3.1x
 
When we used Windows 3.1 at work, it was in the Netware era, so IPX/SPX etc. But the main thing is that the drivers were loaded in DOS, not in Windows.

However a quick search found some information out there, such as
https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?t=75487 and http://www.hawaii.edu/its/micro/pc/win31/win31nic.html

Microsoft also had a networking product, but I was unable to get it working, probably due to my inexperience with it.

The main problem though is you can only visit http sites. You can always start off with google search, because it works on every browser, even if the results look horrible. On WFW I tried Opera, and various Netscape versions. The results unfortunately are not really worth it, as these browsers tend to crash a lot.
 
Pepinno said:
I recently got a vintage laptop: Compaq LTE 5000, with a Pentium-75 CPU and 24 MB RAM, which I already have running Windows 3.1.

I would like this machine to have Internet connectivity (yes, I know Windows for Workgroups 3.11 and Windows NT 3.51 have already built-in TCP/IP stacks; but I have here this Windows 3.1 installation which I quite like).

I remember having Internet connectivity, 25 years ago, in an already obsolete laptop Texas Instruments TravelMate 3000, with Windows 3.1 and *only* 2 MB RAM - I used Forte Free Agent to read USENET, and some very old version of Netscape Navigator to browse some light web pages, and Pegasus Mail for email. It was slow but it worked; the Internet connectivity came thanks to Trumpet Winsock TCP/IP and dial-up through a modem attached to COM1. So I know it is doable.

However... now I don't have dial-up any more, so I guess I need the TCP/IP part of Trumpet Winsock, and then I also need some kind of ethernet driver support which Trumpet Winsock hopefully can attach to an use... So my question is: am I in the right track? How should I go about to get Internet connectivity in Windows 3.1 through an ethernet-based LAN instead of through dial-up?

Any help is extremely welcomed!
Click to expand...
Looking up the LTE 5000 and having worked on a TCP/IP stack for Windows 3.1 (Wollongong's PathWay Runtime 4.0, which was kind of late, and a Windows/386 VxD targeting 3.1 and 3.11) I wonder what sort of I/O it has got.

Built-in Ethernet?

PCMCIA? Can add Ethernet that way. Might get interesting, in the Windows 3.1 era you might have to get card services and socket services going under MS-DOS. I remember having done it on a Toshiba '486 laptop that I used at the time, but not how to do it.

Some other kind of slot? Maybe in a docking station?

If the answer to these is all "no", getting it an Ethernet connection is going to be very interesting.
 
Chuck(G) said:
When I first started out with networking under Windows, it was WFWG.
Click to expand...
It was doable, before Windows for Workgroups 3.1 and 3.11 (which were different, especially if you had something that was a file system redirector), but it usually started out running the TCP/IP stack from MS-DOS (usually as TSRs for network card driver and TCP/IP stack) and then loading Windows. Once Winsock caught on there was typically a WINSOCK.DLL that provided a Winsock interface to the MS-DOS TCP/IP stack, before that there were a variety of vendor-peculiar sockets-flavored DLLs for Windows.

Netmanage had a DLL-based TCP/IP stack. TSR-based TCP/IP stacks became perceived as "old technology" and that's why we reimplemented the Wollongong TCP/IP stack as a Windows Virtual Device Driver (VxD).

These days, Netmanage (including Wall Data and FTP Software) and Attachmate (including The Wollongong Group) and Novell (including Excelan) have all been rolled up into Micro Focus.
 
That sounds like Unix system networking layers from kernel drivers and TCP stack down to the sockets API. On a DOS system, that seems like a stability hell.
From my limited experience, the simpler the stack for early MS system the least it will bug out and crash.

For instance a real 3C905 driver on WfW + MS TCP32 + Windows software is actually way less stable than 3C905 DOS packet driver + respective application software in DOS.

OP's peculiar case aside, in my view Win3.x networking/internet is somewhat redundant. Windows 95 runs Windows 3.x software. Win 95 is "modern" in the way it includes networking, network configuration is easy.
 
Here are some possible solutions (haven't tried them myself) which don't require a network card so they might be a bit easier and lighter on memory usage, although much slower. I guess using RS-232 serial is also a bit more period correct for the experience many of us had, but these also might be harder to get working since you won't find so many explanations online about how to do this stuff.

I assume you could get Trumpet Winsock to talk over a null modem cable to any SLIP or PPP server. My Linux system has an slattach program which can apparently be used to start SLIP or PPP on a serial device. I seem to remember a long time ago getting some old Cisco router to talk SLIP or PPP on one of its RS-232 interfaces. I also seem to recall it wasn't too hard getting SLIP working on Linux manually in the distant past. Just remember that SLIP has no IP autoconfiguration like PPP, so if you use SLIP you need to provide compatible IP settings on both ends of the connection.

twinsock might be another option. It might be simpler because it just uses a userspace program on the Internet-facing/host system rather than something like slattach which is relying on some kernel support and hence might have permissions issues. The problem with twinsock is it's actually from the Windows 3.1 era, so it might be hard to build the host-side program on a modern system. You might enjoy running it on an emulated retro system though, as neozeed did. Unfortunately in this case he didn't just provide a disk image of his 386BSD system he used!
 
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