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Old 12th Jul 2011, 7:12 pm   #1
Kat Manton
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Default Putting a very old laptop online

I like a challenge and I've got a few old laptops lying around. How about getting one of them online?

I thought I'd try this with a Toshiba T2130CT first. I felt I was in with a chance given the amazingly high specification (always the optimist...)
  • 75 MHz 486DX4
  • 12 MB RAM (8 MB RAM built-in; 4 MB PA2026U expansion)
  • 10.4" TFT colour LCD, 640 x 480 x 64K colours
  • 3.5" 1.44 MB / 720 KB floppy drive
  • 520 MB hard disk
  • 2 x PCMCIA slots
(No USB, no CDROM, no Ethernet... No problem..!)

I fired it up and found it'd got NetBSD on it; I must've been playing around with this at some point. I've had some "fun" installing MS-DOS/Windows on machines or drives which had been used with other OSes, so I booted the machine with a tomsrtbt Linux floppy then wiped the MBR and partition table.

Now I could install MS-DOS 6.2 (from legit floppies) then upgrade it to 6.22 (Microsoft MS-DOS 6.2 Step-up Files.)

Great, it boots MS-DOS. Now to get it on my LAN and thus on the 'net. I dug out a suitably vintage 3Com 3C589D Etherlink III PCMCIA card.

This card needs a packet driver. That turned out to be a bit trickier than I anticipated. Hewlett-Packard acquired 3Com in 2010, their www/ftp sites have vanished and HP don't appear to have drivers for older hardware available. However; the UK Mirror Service has mirrored ftp.3com.com/pub/NIC/, where drivers can be found.

In this case, the required file is '589pkt.exe' from the '3c589' directory which I copied to C:\TCPIP on the laptop and ran it to extract 3C589PD.COM - the packet driver for this card.

As a quick test I ran it from the prompt with no parameters:
Code:
3Com EtherLink III PCMCIA Packet Driver v1.3
(C) Copyright 1995 3Com Corp.  All rights reserved.
WARNING: 3C589 could not be configured using Card Services.
    No Card Services or Card Services is not responding.
 Driver will now try to enable 3C589 using PCMCIA host hardware.
3C589 configuration using hardware enabler succeeded.
SUGGESTION: A newer version of this driver is available which may
            offer additional features or improved performance with
            this adapter.
I/O base:                768 (0x300)
Interrupt:               10 (0xA)
Transceiver:             Twisted Pair (10BaseT)
Ethernet Address:        00:60:08:BA:D4:90
Packet Driver Interrupt: 96 (0x60)
Well, that worked. I added it to AUTOEXEC.BAT (loaded into high memory):
Code:
LH C:\TCPIP\3C589PD.COM
What else is needed? Not a lot, as it happens!

Arachne:
Arachne is currently the most advanced graphical web browser available for DOS as it supports many file formats, protocols and standards. [...] Arachne includes a full-fledged TCP/IP connection suite [...]
It's pretty easy to install, all it needs is a packet driver. The setup wizard let me specify DHCP (I have a DHCP/DNS server on my LAN) and it just worked.

I've tweaked it a bit since. The fonts were too big for 640 x 480, but font size can be changed. 'F5' cycles through several themes, so I've selected one which takes up little space. It also runs a lot faster if a RAM disk is set up and Arachne is configured to use that for its cache instead of the (slow, old) hard drive. I think it's possible to speed it up even more if the whole thing is run from RAM disk and may try that. 'F1' brings up 'help'; one of the entries is on optimisation.

Finally, I'll browse to this post on the laptop and grab a screenshot (I don't think the forum's really intended to be accessed with DOS browsers on 16-year-old laptops with 640 x 480 screens, but it works pretty well considering!)

Kat
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Old 12th Jul 2011, 8:46 pm   #2
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Default Re: Putting a very old laptop online

I need to get FTP (or something) working; transferring screengrabs via floppy when they're .BMP and only one fits at a time got tedious...

(Something with an 800 x 600 screen would, I think, work pretty well; I don't think web designers bother with 640 x 480 these days and it shows.)
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Old 12th Jul 2011, 9:15 pm   #3
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Default Re: Putting a very old laptop online

You know, I never knew there were any DOS based web browsers that would still work on today's internet, I guess it just shows how little the web has actually changed since that laptop was brand new...

As for storage, have you thought about using a Parallel ZIP drive (well, one that hasn't died from "Click of Death" syndrome)? it may not be fast, but even at 100MB would be much better than a 1.44MB floppy...
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Old 13th Jul 2011, 11:52 am   #4
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Default Re: Putting a very old laptop online

As long as the content is plain HTML, generally you can do quite well with very simple text based browsers. What causes problems are sites where everything is wrapped up in Flash or Java applets.

Kat - I'm surprised you didn't just run lynx from NetBSD, or would that have been too easy? I've got an old Toshiba Satellite Pentium 90 with a 3Com card that I used to have showing the news headlines until the web site I was using decided to change it's formatting making it unusable. That was running a fairly minimal Slackware Linux install IIRC.
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Old 13th Jul 2011, 12:40 pm   #5
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Default Re: Putting a very old laptop online

Quote:
Originally Posted by twocvbloke View Post
You know, I never knew there were any DOS based web browsers that would still work on today's internet
I didnt know there were any DOS based web browers at all!
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Old 13th Jul 2011, 9:32 pm   #6
Kat Manton
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Default Re: Putting a very old laptop online

Quote:
Originally Posted by twocvbloke View Post
You know, I never knew there were any DOS based web browsers that would still work on today's internet, I guess it just shows how little the web has actually changed since that laptop was brand new...
Actually, the problem with running browsers on older machines is finding one that's fairly recent but 'lightweight' enough. The 'net has changed; I recently tried Netscape 4.74 (on Solaris, it comes with Solaris 8) and found it didn't work with most sites.

OTOH, Arachne v1.95 was released in March 2010; it supports a subset of HTML 4.0 and CSS 1.0 as well as tables and frames; it manages to work with many sites (as long as they don't rely on JavaScript, Java or need a Flash plugin.) Some are rendered in a slightly odd way but most work.

IMO the 'trick' to getting on the web with an older computer is to find an OS which works well on it without eating disk space and RAM, but which will run a fairly recent browser. I could've put MS Windows 3.1 or 95 on this machine, but I'm not sure I could've found a recent browser which runs on it. I'm not sure I'd want to run Windows 95 with only 12 MB RAM (I've run it on a 25 MHz 486DX with 4 MB, "wading through treacle" is an understatement.)

Arachne on DOS, though... it's usable. The 640 x 480 screen is the main problem, not the performance of the hardware. A more recent old laptop with 800 x 600 (or better) ought to work pretty well.

Quote:
Originally Posted by twocvbloke View Post
As for storage, have you thought about using a Parallel ZIP drive (well, one that hasn't died from "Click of Death" syndrome)? it may not be fast, but even at 100MB would be much better than a 1.44MB floppy...
A Zip drive is still 'sneakernet'; it has higher bandwidth than floppy though similar latency...

We have a server on the LAN with a couple of large RAID arrays in it which is already running an FTP server (among other things.) I've now found a DOS FTP client (or two) so I can now fairly easily transfer files between the server and laptop over the LAN.

Now I know how easy it is to get TCP/IP networking going on DOS, what I should've done was:
  1. Install MS-DOS
  2. Install packet driver for network card
  3. Install FTP client
(Incidentally, this would provide a way of installing Windows on a laptop with no CD drive - do the above, copy the \WIN95 directory off the CD onto the FTP server, transfer it onto the laptop's hard drive with a DOS FTP client, then run C:\WIN95\SETUP.EXE to install it. I've done [i]almost[i] that a few times, but using a bootable Linux floppy to get the network up, mount the drive, then FTP the relevant bits of the CD onto it. I'm pretty sure you can get an FTP server for Windows; so this is a Linux-free solution for anyone who'd rather avoid it.)

Quote:
Originally Posted by richrussell View Post
Kat - I'm surprised you didn't just run lynx from NetBSD, or would that have been too easy?
I wanted to see if I could get a recent-enough graphical browser running. (Besides, that NetBSD installation was fairly old, probably pretty minimal and likely to have been mostly unconfigured.)

I'm not sure I'd want to run X on it; one thing I might try is a lightweight Linux distro and a browser which uses SVGAlib (I think SVGAlib will run on FreeBSD, too.) Links looks like one to try.

As it turned out, getting a browser running on MS-DOS was easier than I expected; once the packet driver is installed, Arachne (and other software) just works as the TCP/IP kernel's built-in. (With a BOOTP/DHCP server on the LAN there's almost no configuration needed.)

Okay, that was all far too easy... I've got an older Toshiba laptop, a T4400C; all that's got in the way of external interfacing is a serial port and a parallel port. How about I try to get that on the 'net, too? (I'm thinking PPP, SLIP or PLIP, with PLIP looking most likely though I'll need to make a cable.)

It's fun, is this. I'm going to have to list 'retro computing' as a hobby, aren't I..?

Kat
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Old 14th Jul 2011, 6:18 am   #7
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Default Re: Putting a very old laptop online

That 's impressive work, I had no idea there were web browsers for 'pre GUI' OSs!
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Old 14th Jul 2011, 11:07 am   #8
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Default Re: Putting a very old laptop online

PPP and SLIP aren't too bad - after all, it's not that long ago we were all using dial up modems. I certainly had no problems getting online with Windows 95, Slackware, Redhat and Mandrake Linuxes using a 56k modem, and also over a null-modem cable to another PC.
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Old 14th Jul 2011, 12:49 pm   #9
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Default Re: Putting a very old laptop online

But what browser did you use, what web-sites did it work with, and how long did you have to wait to display a web page?
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Old 14th Jul 2011, 2:13 pm   #10
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Default Re: Putting a very old laptop online

Probably Mosaic or Netscape (this being in the mid-1990s). It was acceptable in terms of speed - though most web sites were pure HTML then.

Certainly it was still worthwhile cycling up to the University of York (that I'd just graduated from in 1995) with a stack of floppy discs, sneaking into the room with SGI Indigos in, and downloading stuff there whilst my account was still active rather than trying to do it over my 14.4kbps modem!

I think my Amiga is still set up to use an external modem to connect to BT Internet over PPP. So if I can find a suitable modem and the BT number still works, I might dig it all out and give it a go.
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Old 15th Jul 2011, 12:07 pm   #11
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Default Re: Putting a very old laptop online

Russel Nelson maintains the Crynwr packet driver collection. See http://www.crynwr.com/ That used to cover most cards, although some of the later NE2000 clones I tried had variations on these and needed their own custom ones.
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Old 18th Jul 2011, 6:30 pm   #12
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Default Re: Putting a very old laptop online

Kat, theres something you might like in the bin at work, its small and x86 based, monochrome of course. Fancy giving that a shot? hahaha

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Old 2nd Aug 2011, 8:09 pm   #13
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Default Re: Putting a very old laptop online

I've surfed on a lesser specced (386) machine, so you should have no problems with this one.

Windows 3 should work fine. It'll run IE5 (dunno that I'd want to with so little RAM, though!) or an old version of Navigator. You'll probably want to streamline the system for 'optimal' performance (if you'd call it that)!

As for 95, I've done it on a 286. That's just painful!! That said, I used to have a version of 95 that ran off a floppy! You could use 98lite to streamline, of course.
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Old 13th Aug 2011, 9:32 am   #14
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Default Re: Putting a very old laptop online

You can get pretty much get anything to run on the net, I've had a Commodore 64 run a basic web browser.
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Old 13th Aug 2011, 9:41 am   #15
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Default Re: Putting a very old laptop online

Now you're versed in the art Kat. Try getting a ZX81 on-line...
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Old 14th Aug 2011, 6:02 am   #16
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Default Re: Putting a very old laptop online

I have a couple of machines running windows ME, i use it to play some old games as some wont run under any modern version of windows.

I have had them online but ie6 highest win 98/me got is unsuported by most
web pages, ones like this are fine but anything flash based its a complete no
no.
There are no 3 party web browsers anymore for the older versions of windows that will open all internet sights, it seems unless u can find a compact version of linux to run the internet is leaving the older machines behind.
I have an old compaq armada laptop p133 64mb ram this runs ME suprisingly fast.
Its nice to see other people using older computers rather than putting them in the bin
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Old 18th Dec 2011, 9:29 pm   #17
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Default Re: Putting a very old laptop online

How about this?
Get a pcmcia usb card - cost about £5 off ebay
Make a 'wakepup' floppy as detailed here:

http://puppylinux.com/hard-puppy.htm

Put puppy linux on a usb pen-drive (should be formatted fat-16) - you probably want wary puppy (http://bkhome.org/wary/)
Put the pcmcia usb card in the laptop and put the pen drive in it.
Put the boot floppy in the laptop, and, fingers crossed, puppy linux should boot . . . you never know.
I think you get a choice of which browser to install - I think Midori is the most lightweight from the choices.

The nice thing about this approach is that you shouldn't have to touch the current install on the hard drive.

Cheers
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Old 18th Dec 2011, 9:43 pm   #18
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Default Re: Putting a very old laptop online

Ignore my post re: Puppy, it needs 128MB to run!
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Old 18th Dec 2011, 9:53 pm   #19
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Default Re: Putting a very old laptop online

Blimey ,i thought mine was ancient - IBMThinkpad 600x ,with 192 ram on Win2k sp4 .,with only one USB port and since onboard mouse has gone gaga and ps2 port is U/S -need a 4 port adapter to use mouse and dongle
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Old 20th Dec 2011, 12:32 am   #20
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Default Re: Putting a very old laptop online

My first internet experiences in mid 1994 were on the networked PCs at uni - 386s at 25 mhz, not sure how much RAM - 8 or 16 MB, probably. Nescape Navigator used to run reasonably well - in those days, you didn't expect pages to just appear instantly though.

I'd love to try and recreate this sometime, just out of curiosity, and I think that time may be approaching - a work colleague gave me what he thinks is a 386 last week...
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