keenmaster486 wrote:

Warlord wrote:

I have a copy of dosrdp, idk if anyone ever heard about it, but you can connect to 2000 or xp with RDP from dos.

What?! I did not know that existed. Is that something you could share here?

https://www.softpedia.com/get/Others/Miscella … us/DOSRDP.shtml

I believe this is it

keenmaster486 wrote:

In the past few years I have been regularly using MS-DOS, Windows 3.1, 95, 98SE, and 2000 fully exposed on the internet with no […]
Show full quote

In the past few years I have been regularly using MS-DOS, Windows 3.1, 95, 98SE, and 2000 fully exposed on the internet with no antivirus, no security patches except for 2000 SP4, etc. -- and I have had no issues whatsoever.

I don't think ANY viruses nowadays run on those old OS's. You would have to either accidentally or purposefully seek one out, maybe download something on an ancient FTP site that is infected, or something. Nothing's actively sniffing out that stuff.

I've even had vulnerable services up and running on my retro PCs and ported through on my home router, and... nothing.

By contrast I've had internet services up and running using modern Linux servers and there have been constant infiltration attempts by Chinese or Russian bots almost immediately.

Basically, virus writers and hackers don't give a damn about OS's that take up 0.00001% of the internet. It's just not worth it.

Basically, apparently... all we have to do is just... "be smarter with where you click" and our retro OS will be safe. Phew!

BeginnerGuy wrote:

https://www.softpedia.com/get/Others/Mi ... SRDP.shtml

I believe this is it

Cool, but apparently this software is not free? Is someone still making money off of it?

bfcastello wrote:

Basically, apparently... all we have to do is just... "be smarter with where you click" and our retro OS will be safe. Phew!

I don't know if you're being facetious or not, but this has been my real experience over many years. Either I am ridiculously, exceptionally lucky, or I'm right. Either way I don't care regardless, because I never have anything important on my old PCs anyway. All my other computers run Linux so they can't be infected by a Windows virus.

keenmaster486 wrote:

[quote="BeginnerGu

bfcastello wrote:

Basically, apparently... all we have to do is just... "be smarter with where you click" and our retro OS will be safe. Phew!

I don't know if you're being facetious or not, but this has been my real experience over many years. Either I am ridiculously, exceptionally lucky, or I'm right. Either way I don't care regardless, because I never have anything important on my old PCs anyway. All my other computers run Linux so they can't be infected by a Windows virus.

That's been my experience going back 20 years now almost. I've only maybe had three viruses in that time and ALL were on "Modern" machines running Microsoft Windows and all were most likely the result of negligent surfing or negligent software installation by people I gave access other than myself (girlfriends).

It seems to me to be a lot of FUD being spread by misleading or misread information from the news and "network security experts", and being perpetuated by scared non/not-as technical people as we are here. It's also, for some at least, another vector of "your computer is oooooooold, you need a new one".

I can see a lot of parallels between us and vintage car people. The mainstream tends to think you only drive a 1967 Ford Mustang Fastback when in actuality you have the Mustang and a modern SUV for your daily driver. Except in our case the Fastback is a 1993 486 DX and our daily might be a Core i3 we hardly talk about. They both drive on the same "street" but they have different reasons to be. Sure you could take the i3 to Hot August Nights or the track but that's no fun. And fitting the family or hauling lumber in the Fastback is both impractical and a recipe for disaster.

The people complaining about the lack of emissions equipment on a classic car are the same type telling us were killing the internet with 486s running Windows 95, except the latter argument is actually almost baseless. And based in history from a time when people only bought books from Amazon (because that's all they sold back then) from a Webcrawler Search at 14.4Kbps on a machine they barely understand running a new-at-the-time O/S that actually DID have the ability at the time of performing such a now risky transaction. Just look at what we have to do now just to see a simple website on such a rig today. Their opinions are like a bad 80s McDonalds commercial with a baseless villian like the hamburglar. "Robble, robble, I'm making off with your Monkey Islands and McKids NES ROMZ.....Robble Robble.....you shoulda never downloaded my NESticle!"

keenmaster486 wrote:

BeginnerGuy wrote:

https://www.softpedia.com/get/Others/Mi ... SRDP.shtml

I believe this is it

Cool, but apparently this software is not free? Is someone still making money off of it?

It's abandonware, I have keys for it/registered.

keenmaster486 wrote:

I don't know if you're being facetious or not, but this has been my real experience over many years. Either I am ridiculously, exceptionally lucky, or I'm right. Either way I don't care regardless, because I never have anything important on my old PCs anyway. All my other computers run Linux so they can't be infected by a Windows virus.

Well, I was pretending to be kinda funny, but with all seriousness, I believe you are half right. Because retro OSes aren’t being much of a target nowadays. But some old websites still exist so old viruses may stil exist too.

bfcastello wrote:

keenmaster486 wrote:

I don't know if you're being facetious or not, but this has been my real experience over many years. Either I am ridiculously, exceptionally lucky, or I'm right. Either way I don't care regardless, because I never have anything important on my old PCs anyway. All my other computers run Linux so they can't be infected by a Windows virus.

Well, I was pretending to be kinda funny, but with all seriousness, I believe you are half right. Because retro OSes aren’t being much of a target nowadays. But some old websites still exist so old viruses may stil exist too.

Of course there's a risks. I don't think anyone has denied that. There is also a risk with *nix, though less so. Who knows when a worm of the past is going to pop up and infiltrate your system because some idiot has logged in as root and surfing porn sites. Of cousre not visiting those porn site will reduce the chances of getting infected aka selective "clicking" as you term it. There is a reason projects like rkhunter and ckrootkit exist.

Yup, that’s what I meant. Gotta be selective with what you click on the web...

I believe it happened to me once years ago with a Windows 10 machine. I had one of these malwares where my files got encrypted and a txt file was left asking for bitcoins to restore them. In the end I just laughed at myself and reformatted the entire drive, reinstalling everything back in the process. That machine wasn’t even my daily driver back then - just a racing simulator for online competitions. My 2010 MacBook Pro was my daily driver, and had no problems.

bfcastello wrote:

Yup, that’s what I meant. Gotta be selective with what you click on the web...

I believe it happened to me once years ago with a Windows 10 machine. I had one of these malwares where my files got encrypted and a txt file was left asking for bitcoins to restore them. In the end I just laughed at myself and reformatted the entire drive, reinstalling everything back in the process. That machine wasn’t even my daily driver back then - just a racing simulator for online competitions. My 2010 MacBook Pro was my daily driver, and had no problems.

One reason to have known good back ups. No need for a total reinstall from scratch is required. Now need for driver hunting and crap like that. Also handy if there is a hardware failure, ie your main storage/boot device goes tits up.

probably unlikely you can get a virus using windows 98se in 2019, only way you can get one is installing a program that has been around that log with malware in it. like pirated game you found thats been sitting around forever on the interwebs., or using some kinda infected keygen thats been around for 20 years that you somehow go a hold of.

But in general most the time from my experience is unsupported oses getting viruses is fake news and propaganda pushed by MS, and spread by inexperienced computer users that don't know anything about technology, to scare other people who are just as inexperienced to upgrade and pay ms more money.

People who usually get viruses even on windows 10 in 2019 are people who have no idea what they are doing, and don't understand technology. No one puts things on their computer, they themselves initiate everything and install it themselves, because they have no idea what they are doing.

There natral reaction is to blame the software or computer and ignore the fact that they are idiots and they caused it.

I've already mentioned this on another thread here on Vogons, but it's definitely more relevant here. In short, I've managed to get a Wayback Machine proxy working. Here's a screenshot of idsoftware.com from ~2000 running in Netscape Communicator 4.08 in Windows 3.11. It's a Pentium 133 machine with Intel PRO/100 network card. The TCP/IP is being provided by Microsoft's TCP/IP-32 3.11b stack.

I have a tiny computer (an older Intel NUC, actually) running Ubuntu as my FTP server for all my retro machines. I've installed NodeJS and downloaded vintage-proxy on it. Then I've ran the server and configured Netscape to use my NUC as an HTTP proxy over port 8080.

After that I can enter an URL into Netscape and have my NUC respond with a saved page from Wayback Machine. The whole thing runs nice with a few caveats:

- no dynamic content. Stuff like jsp and asp pages doesn't work (because WaybackMachine can't possibly store them), same goes for Flash as far as I can see. So it's kind of better to set an earlier date in server.js (say, 1996 instead of 2000). If WaybackMachine doesn't have a copy for 1996, the proxy will revert to a later date until it finds something;
- it's kind of slow. There's a significant delay in response and the transfer speed isn't great. I like to think that this makes my experience more "authentic" 😀;
- Netscape does crash quite a bit. I think a newer Windows with a more modern browser would work better, but I'm currently interested in Win3.11;
- Cyrillic doesn't work. I've tried opening Yandex.ru (Russian search engine) and Fargus.com (the biggest Russian game publisher of the 90s), but could not get the text to show properly no matter what encoding I chose.

Still, the whole thing feels pretty magical to me.

Caluser2000 wrote:

bfcastello wrote:

Yup, that’s what I meant. Gotta be selective with what you click on the web...

I believe it happened to me once years ago with a Windows 10 machine. I had one of these malwares where my files got encrypted and a txt file was left asking for bitcoins to restore them. In the end I just laughed at myself and reformatted the entire drive, reinstalling everything back in the process. That machine wasn’t even my daily driver back then - just a racing simulator for online competitions. My 2010 MacBook Pro was my daily driver, and had no problems.

One reason to have known good back ups. No need for a total reinstall from scratch is required. Now need for driver hunting and crap like that. Also handy if there is a hardware failure, ie your main storage/boot device goes tits up.

Oh, I had two backups. One with documents and installers on my external hdd, other with the same on my Time Capsule. I don’t mind reinstalling when shit happens. Sometimes it comes back better.

jheronimus wrote:

I've already mentioned this on another thread here on Vogons, but it's definitely more relevant here. In short, I've managed to […]
Show full quote

I've already mentioned this on another thread here on Vogons, but it's definitely more relevant here. In short, I've managed to get a Wayback Machine proxy working. Here's a screenshot of idsoftware.com from ~2000 running in Netscape Communicator 4.08 in Windows 3.11. It's a Pentium 133 machine with Intel PRO/100 network card. The TCP/IP is being provided by Microsoft's TCP/IP-32 3.11b stack.

I have a tiny computer (an older Intel NUC, actually) running Ubuntu as my FTP server for all my retro machines. I've installed NodeJS and downloaded vintage-proxy on it. Then I've ran the server and configured Netscape to use my NUC as an HTTP proxy over port 8080.

After that I can enter an URL into Netscape and have my NUC respond with a saved page from Wayback Machine. The whole thing runs nice with a few caveats:

- no dynamic content. Stuff like jsp and asp pages doesn't work (because WaybackMachine can't possibly store them), same goes for Flash as far as I can see. So it's kind of better to set an earlier date in server.js (say, 1996 instead of 2000). If WaybackMachine doesn't have a copy for 1996, the proxy will revert to a later date until it finds something;
- it's kind of slow. There's a significant delay in response and the transfer speed isn't great. I like to think that this makes my experience more "authentic" 😀;
- Netscape does crash quite a bit. I think a newer Windows with a more modern browser would work better, but I'm currently interested in Win3.11;
- Cyrillic doesn't work. I've tried opening Yandex.ru (Russian search engine) and Fargus.com (the biggest Russian game publisher of the 90s), but could not get the text to show properly no matter what encoding I chose.

Still, the whole thing feels pretty magical to me.

That's awesome. I'll try it out soon as I get a chance.

jheronimus wrote:

I wish there was an easy Wayback Machine proxy so I could just open Netscape on my 90s machine, type in an URL and browse the archived version of the site. I mean, http://oldweb.today exists, so this should really be doable, but I don't have the skills to make it happen.

Don't have the skills? Seems that has changed 😎

But what about http://theoldnet.com? It seems to do just about the same thing you're trying to do here. Perhaps you could improve upon it somehow though.

keenmaster486 wrote:

But what about http://theoldnet.com? It seems to do just about the same thing you're trying to do here. Perhaps you could improve upon it somehow though.

For some reason it just doesn't load in Russia, so I figured it was down when you've posted it the first time. Now I've tried to go there via VPN — yeah, it's seems to be blocked here for some reason.

Unfortunately, it does happen with some odd sites (I can't reach philscomputerlab.com without a VPN either) — maybe both sites are hosted on AWS? Russian authorities hit many AWS-hosted sites hard last year in an attempt to block Telegram messenger.

jheronimus wrote:

For some reason it just doesn't load in Russia, so I figured it was down when you've posted it the first time. Now I've tried to go there via VPN — yeah, it's seems to be blocked here for some reason.

Dang, that sucks. I wonder if there's a way we could forward it over there to you.

In other news, I have completed the test version of my retro YouTube translator: YouTube translator for retro systems

If you don't mind me asking, how does a Wayback proxy work? What are the limitations?

Braca862 wrote:

If you don't mind me asking, how does a Wayback proxy work? What are the limitations?

I'm not the author of the actual code, but as far as I understand it just pulls the static content (e.g. html pages, css files, jpg and gif images) for the requested date and URL and serves them over the 8080 port to my old machine. Most limitations stem from the nature of Wayback Machine itself. E.g. it can't serve dynamic pages or Flash content — only regular static html pages (becomes rather relevant around year 2000 or so) and the download links for large files are mostly dead.

What a cool thread! I have in my Pentium 3 Windows 98 SE machine an inLine USB 2.0 PCI card and a wireless mouse. After installing nusb36.exe, I plugged the mouse transmitter into the mobos original USB 1.1 port. It worked but not very well, then I switched it into the new 2.0 port and it works nicely. Someone said that it shouldn´t matter but it seems make a difference. I also tested a wireless mouse/keyboard combo and it worked great!

Next I´m planning install two wireless gamepads to play fighting games and such. I was thinking Logitech F710. And I also wish to share internet connection with my modern PC via WiFi. I realize using internet with old browsers is basically painful, but I´m not doing it for surfing exactly. Just for using messenger and using simple windows 98 friendly websites to download patches, etc. Thoughts?

DId anyone manage to get youtube working on Windows 98 in any browser? 2019 it is... I can only get it working on Windows 2000 Professional, Blackwingcat extended kernel and Firefox 52.x ESR. Not really what I wanted to do.

I have made a major update to my retro chat app: Re: Announcing CleanChat, a retro-compatible chat program (challenge: make your own client!)