I thought getting 98 online was as easy as plugging a network cable from my router into a lan card but that didn't result in internet access. I only used dialup in the pre-xp days, and with xp up until about 2005, so I don't recall if any extra steps were needed before that. I did have broadband during part of that time but the router was a usb with drivers.
wrote:I thought getting 98 online was as easy as plugging a network cable from my router into a lan card but that didn't result in internet access. I only used dialup in the pre-xp days, and with xp up until about 2005, so I don't recall if any extra steps were needed before that. I did have broadband during part of that time but the router was a usb with drivers.
Define broadband.
if you mean Ethernet, even dos will work with that provided you have the right driver.
However 9x will work with Ethernet out of the box with the right card and drivers. at the most your need to enable tcp/ip if you did not install it with windows.
wrote:provided you have the right driver.
Exactly this. An OS doesn't just natively automatically know how to use a network adapter, it needs drivers that allow it to "talk" to those devices before it can use them. Whether the driver is installed by the end-user at home or by a guy at the factory where the store-bought machine was built, this is still a required "extra step". Even today it's possible to build a brand-new computer, install Windows 10 on it, and need to manually install a driver before the ethernet or wifi will work on it.
After the correct driver has been installed, I'd say the first version of Windows to "accept a broadband connection without any extra steps" would be Windows NT 3.5, since it was the first version of Windows to enable TCP/IP by default. Win3.x, WinNT 3.1 and even the RTM version of Windows 95 didn't enable TCP/IP by default, you had to manually turn it on yourself. It wasn't until Win95 OSR2 that TCP/IP was enabled by default for non-NT versions of Windows.
Didn't 95 enable tcp/ip if you installed the network driver during the install of windows? Or do you still have to install the tcp/ip service?
The odds are that Linux will load the appropriate nic drivers, along with tcp/ip, during the installation process.
There's a glitch in the matrix.
A founding member of the 286 appreciation society.
Apparently 32-bit is dead and nobody likes P4s.
Of course, as always, I'm open to correction...😉
wrote:Didn't 95 enable tcp/ip if you installed the network driver during the install of windows? Or do you still have to install the tcp/ip service?
This is possible. I wouldn't know for sure because I've never set up a Win95 RTM system for ethernet before, and thus never had need to install a LAN driver during setup. I only remember having to manually install TCP/IP to get dial-up internet working because the out-of-box default for Win95 at the time was IPX/SPX and NetBEUI if I recall correctly.
Maybe NT3.5 workstation would work but like others have said you will still need to set up nic drivers just like any other OS. I had DOS connected to my broadband connection last year with the right packet driver which was a relatively painless process.
