Here is interesting post about 286 and TCP/IP network https://habr.com/en/post/436006/
Unfortunately author also failed with web browser 🙁

zyga64 wrote on 2021-09-07, 18:08:

Here is interesting post about 286 and TCP/IP network https://habr.com/en/post/436006/
Unfortunately author also failed with web browser 🙁

Great article. Thanks. I also use a DE220 nic on my 286 and it works like a dream. In fact it is my preferred 16-bit ISA network for 486s down.

It was just occurring to me that the real early versions of mosaic probably expect winsock 1.1 not 2, this is the early version of trumpet winsock I found https://www.uselesssoftware.com/download/winsock-zip

BitWrangler wrote on 2021-09-07, 20:22:

It was just occurring to me that the real early versions of mosaic probably expect winsock 1.1 not 2, this is the early version of trumpet winsock I found https://www.uselesssoftware.com/download/winsock-zip

I'm using Version 1 rev. a on the Zenith.

Are trumpet utilities like ping FTP telnet etc "getting out into the real world" with it with DNS resolved names or no?

BitWrangler wrote on 2021-09-07, 20:53:

Are trumpet utilities like ping FTP telnet etc "getting out into the real world" with it with DNS resolved names or no?

Win 3.x FTP, TELNET(both pinched from WfW3.11) and the PIRTCH16 irc clients work just fine.

So immediately after running one of those to "wake up" the connection does Mosaic work? (Used to find that a lot back in the day that some browsers didn't seem to initialize connection right and something else, like mail, ICQ or IE had to run to kick start it.)

BitWrangler wrote on 2021-09-07, 22:03:

So immediately after running one of those to "wake up" the connection does Mosaic work? (Used to find that a lot back in the day that some browsers didn't seem to initialize connection right and something else, like mail, ICQ or IE had to run to kick start it.)

As per my previous Mosaic screenshots. It connects but you basically get garbage on the screen.

I think that's "working" as far as working with modern html code goes.

try http://www.milk.com

Guess who finally got this thing working (mainly thanks to you guys. Very much appreciated all 😀)

I downloaded WinSock 1.0 from the link above, cleaned out the newer winsock files and tried the non-tls hackaday site and it worked just fine (well, considering i only get script-data on screen but that was expected after all 😁 ). This is great.

Next i will try to locate any alternative to Mosaic that will also run on 3.1(1). Might not make any visual differences due to old rendering, but its quite interesting still.

Thank you everyone

br.

m.

Cool, congratulations! I could have only dreamed of that much memory on my 286 back then… (I would have been more than happy with 2MB)

my03 wrote on 2021-09-08, 11:01:

Guess who finally got this thing working (mainly thanks to you guys. Very much appreciated all :)) […]
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Guess who finally got this thing working (mainly thanks to you guys. Very much appreciated all 😀)

I downloaded WinSock 1.0 from the link above, cleaned out the newer winsock files and tried the non-tls hackaday site and it worked just fine (well, considering i only get script-data on screen but that was expected after all 😁 ). This is great.

Next i will try to locate any alternative to Mosaic that will also run on 3.1(1). Might not make any visual differences due to old rendering, but its quite interesting still.

Thank you everyone

br.

m.

Good on ya.

retro.hackaday.com looks weird, not sure if you got an error page from hostgator, their host I guess, maybe it was down, or it's a redirect that doesn't work.

Something else to try http://frogfind.com in view source mode that looks really tame, first gen html, but who knows what trips up this early stuff.

Tried it BitWrangler, and it had a "twist" 😀

I saw that it tried to load the frog-image, then it exploded 😁

I wonder if Opera ever launched a browser for the pre-386 era? I tried version 2.x versions but they all wanted 386.

There should be an option somewhere to turn images off if they are going to be a problem. Probably wants straight gif87 format or something.

hmmm there's the old classic http://info.cern.ch/ but not sure if those modern compatibility <li> tags are just getting ignored like they should be, or whether it's snagging on them.

Then there's a mid 90s search/directory still up at http://www.aliweb.com/ but gut feels is that that wants Netscape 2 or better.

Heh ignore my diversion about <li> tags for some reason I thought they were later html

Another possible page to try http://oldhomepage.cf/ Some of those old browsers seemed to have "acceptable" TLDs hardcoded though, hope it likes .cf

Ringding wrote on 2021-09-08, 13:51:

Cool, congratulations! I could have only dreamed of that much memory on my 286 back then… (I would have been more than happy with 2MB)

In all honesty, i think 2MB would be the "sweet spot" on this thing as the memory count takes forever to finish 😁

I only did get the ISA memory expansion because i wanted to check out if this 286 could go beyond 16MB (i got 4 sticks quite cheap that was supposed to be 4MB ones, turned out they were 1MB and so i haven't yet seen it through properly...).

Maybe one day....

Just an idea, but couldn't you set up your own proxy server that already does some of the more difficult tasks such as filtering out images? I can't imagine even simple sites* with huge (for the time) images will ever load properly in 16MB... A proxy might also be able to get around requirements such as HTTPS.

* if you look around there still are a lot of simpler sites with very basic HTML.