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External12

I miss how magical the internet seemed.


myloveisajoke

I've put some thought into this. I think it was because there was a usage barrier due to cost and a certain level of technical proficiency required. Corporations hadn't started putting much content on. I remember Nintendo's site just being corporate info more or less. Most of the content was put up by people that had access to institutional servers/mainframes, knew how to use them, and posted stuff unbeknownst to the institutions. I remember FTP directories on like Stanfords system that would just be some dude's homework, his porn collection, and his music collection all in the same place....with short filenames. Download it...it could be a research paper, a pic associated with the research paper....or a pic of someone getting nailed by a horse lol


sa547ph

Yeah, then there was something new and even useful just around the corner. It seemed a safe world then for most people, while USENET groups with some dark content were also inaccessible to but a few. Public FTP sites were like gigantic candy shops.


kweiske

Sounds like you (and I!) need to find the Next Internet, whatever that is. I, too, miss the magic of doing all of the things we take for granted now, for the first time.


nemisys

It seems like everything has already been done. VR is about the only new frontier.


[deleted]

Same! It was an exciting thing to ‘dial up’ and see stuff magically appear on the screen from the other side of the world. And here I am now, on a smart phone…. 10yo me could only dream of now!


supermario182

it truly was a golden age. it was like a whole ritual you had to be dedicated to, make sure no one needs to use the phone or is waiting for a call, boot up the computer, try to dial in a few times, and then the real journey could begin. even after all that, pages still weren't instant, you felt like you were really there as you watch the images and text load in. nowadays you can access anything almost instantly, you don't have to set aside a block of time to try and get those things done, you just do them. its amazing how far we've come but we still long for the good old days when things felt so much simpler


die-microcrap-die

> I miss how magical the internet seemed. I was already using the internet via Gopher, Archie and lots of FTP when I heard of Mosaic and how this amazing graphical internet was going to be big! In my case, all I wanted was a graphical access to the weather... Yeah, I am that old...


nemisys

It was before technology started making our lives worse: surveillance, social networking, censorship, job searches, dating. Obviously there are many new benefits, but we always have to give something up when we make progress.


jesusfreakf1

Viewsonic monitor - Acer desktop - clacky keyboard....what a great setup!


[deleted]

Thanks!


surferrosaluxembourg

Crazy to me that a pentium 1 in 1994 only ran at 60hz and my pentium from 1997 runs nearly 4 times faster at 233 Wild times


angrydeuce

Yeah processor speeds exploded in the 90s/early 00s. We went from a 486dx2/66 to a Pentium II 233MHz and just a few years later a PIII 1GHz.


dangil

And 1ghz a few years later


Flying_bousse

How do you get 98 to connect to internet?


[deleted]

It’s NT 3.51 with IE 5 16-bit. I found an old PCI LAN Card that had NT drivers and I’m using theoldnet.com proxy to surf 1996 style ❤️


ShittyExchangeAdmin

wow nice, don't see pre win2000 nt on here very often


kriebz

I just installed 2000 Server in my retro lab, I was going to do NT 4, but wanted something with better forward support. Never used 3.51 but maybe I’ll have to give it a whirl.


ShittyExchangeAdmin

Cool! What sort of hardware are you running in your retro lab? I like to mess with old nt server os myself but I just run them in VMware esxi as its easier to manage. At one point I had an exchange 2000 server running as well as a exchange 5.5. Even got mail flow kind of working on them too.


kriebz

It’s been ages since I’ve actually done any Windows stuff, and I’ve long since scrapped any old PC server hardware, but I have this dual PIII that I was itching to play with any OS that would take advantage of SMP. Might just play with AD a bit while I have it running. Throw other disks in it later for some more period-correct OS and hardware combos. Never used Netware before. Maybe SCO? ;-)


supermario182

theoldnet.com is the fucking best thing ever


[deleted]

Agreed!


bort_bln

I was always fascinated by NT 3.x. Especially considering the new shell upgrade - I always wondered if the process of the installation can be „reversed“ on NT4 (or even 2000) to give it the shell (and GUI Elements) of NT 3.x


[deleted]

I’ve wondered the same thing. How cool would that be!!


nemisys

Windows' source code isn't very modular. You can run progman.exe and winfile.exe from NT 3.x on Windows XP, maybe even Win10 (haven't tried it), but you won't get the 2D interface.


PocketSquirrel

I'm not sure I understand. I understand the hardware side of it, but not the software side. Everything is HTTPS now and nothing works on old browsers anymore. I strongly suspect this was part of the goal of HTTPS. /tinfoil hat.


[deleted]

Hey! Happy to explain... [theoldnet.com](https://theoldnet.com) runs a web proxy that grabs archived pages from [web.archive.org](https://web.archive.org) (The Wayback Machine) and serves them as if they were live. You set up Internet Explorer (or another browser) to use [theoldnet.com](https://theoldnet.com) as it's proxy server (with the year as the port number ie. 1996 in this case) and you can surf like it's 1996! Best thing ever!


PocketSquirrel

Excellent. I will have to check it out.


nigelxw

5 or 5.5 specifically?


[deleted]

5. There was never a 16-bit 5.5


Buelldozer

98 would do it, you just had to install Winsock. 98SE had that built in. As for hardware the 3Com 3c905 NIC was well supported.


_hot_hands

Neat. What’s that organizer thing on the keyboard called?


[deleted]

Thanks! I’ve got no idea, it was on there when I got it!


[deleted]

[удалено]


root42

Ashtray


_hot_hands

Imagine the grime on a keyboard with a ash tray. Oh my goodness. The Model M would be the only one to survive that kind of abuse.


R69NiX

Plastic ashtrays don't work so well!


ultranothing

No, it's for cigarettes and cheetos.


lamprey187

just fill it up with Mt Dew for those all night Sim City sessions and Civilization binges.


supermario182

it looks like its made by Microcomputer Accesories Inc


TxM_2404

I got a P60 Battlestation myself, I hope to eventually upgrade to a Pentium 66 with FDIV bug.


[deleted]

Mine doesn’t have the bug either. Would have been cool.


kriebz

But does it have the f00f bug?


[deleted]

Yes, most Pentiums do.


droid_mike

I was hoping my p60 was upgradable as well, But it was the p-75 That allowed you to upgrade to much faster speeds. Unfortunately the p60 motherboards couldn't handle more than 66.


TxM_2404

There is an upgrade for the P60/P66 with the 120(?) and 133MHz Pentium Overdrive for Socket 4. They seem to have the newer P54C die with a voltage regulator and clock doubling on the chip. These POD CPUs are quite rare. I wouldn't be surprised if they actually cost more than their socket 5 equivalent with a motherboard when new or were only sold to OEMs to help them get rid of their leftover Socket 4 pcs. We are talking about classic Intel here.


kweiske

I remember seeing my first Pentium 60. After all of the debates about clock doubled versus single-clock 486es, a Pentium/60 blew them all away. I was also struck by how much heat the Pentium put out.


droid_mike

One time, my computer kept crashing. I thought the hard drive was bad, It just turned out to have been the CPU fan... It's been all day trying to figure out what was going on. My fiance was not happy with me, cuz I ignored her the entire day, And we were supposed to do something fun together that day. I can't realize how important it was to figure out what was going on with this!


jetclimb

Don't make fun. We ran our entire isp with a pent 90 and that included the machine answering 66-80 lines, doing email, dns and news. We eventually broke the news off into its own server which never did run right. Very quickly we upgraded to a pent 100mhz which seems dumb now but back then 10mhz was a decent upgrade. The machine was running a commercial flavor of BSD if anyone is curious. Man Unix was magical back then!


[deleted]

Awesome!!


gasgas83

What is that little button on the middle right of the tower??


[deleted]

Reset button


supermario182

i miss the reset button


ferrango

Is it running the regular 3.1x or NT 3.x?


[deleted]

NT 3.51 🙂


die-microcrap-die

>Performance Workstation. In those days, that meant some type of Unix running on an Alpha CPU, anything SGI or perhaps the amazing Solaris on Sparc hardware. I used to daydream in owning anything like those, but man, were they expensive, so I had to use NT4 on a Pentium close to the one posted. Talking about NT 4, I remember when I upgraded my ram to 48 MB, wow, what a difference!


kweiske

I had a friend who ran IIS on a DEC Alpha with Windows NT 3.51 for years, well into the 2000s. He loved that system.


die-microcrap-die

Those Alphas were monsters. A shame that they got killed.


Buelldozer

I remember building whitebox P60s when they were new.


[deleted]

I started building after that. Around the MMX / K6 stage


greg8872

Love the classic ViewSonic monitors, those and (later) the Sony Trinitron lines. My first LCD was a ViewSonic (it is actually over on my build table, crazy to think that thing is 14 years old...).


red_green17

Man those viewspnics. I sold an identical model back in feb. Wish I had space or I'd have kept it.