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Comment by paleotrope | Hacker News Reader

Seems like an example of being too early to the market.

I mean you had BBS' but what else. Did this even do TCPIP? Windows didn't get a TCPIP stack till 3.11 right?

There was a cable-based serial terminal networking system called LocalNet, which was all over the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign campus circa 1985. The LocalNet modems/concentrators connected terminals and computers throughout the campus. You'd fire up your terminal, hit ENTER for a prompt, then type CALL xxx,yyy (xxx and yyy being hex addresses) to reach a particular host. The host just saw it as just another RS-232 modem.

I'm not an expert, but I'm pretty sure you're correct. Interestingly though, I have an PC I got from a college that has Win 3.11 and has a network card in it and TCP/IP isn't enabled or on it. I was trying to figure out how to use the network card, but all I can find are a bunch of other communication standards.

I was installing laptops with windows 3.11 for workgroups in the 90s to get the tcpip stack.

https://casadevall.pro/articles/2020/05/exploring-windows-fo...

Agreed ... You need WFW or a third party TCP/IP stack.

I think you needed Trumpet WinSOCK to get 311 on the internet. And there wasn't much other than email, and Netscape to do with it back then. Gopher maybe, but I didn't hear about what that was until it was more or less dead.

Even then, no dialer, trumpet winsock it was to get online. Win 95 had the first dialer and tcp/ip integration

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