3 ms·

I recently revived an old laptop that was sold for scrap, it was fully working... just missing a power adapter. Dos 6.22 and Win3.11. Much more usable than I

I recently revived an old laptop that was sold for scrap, it was fully working... just missing a power adapter. Dos 6.22 and Win3.11. Much more usable than I remembered. Was kinda sorta able to get online with a PCMCIA Ethernet card. Aside from the whole, well... lack of HTTPS support in any browser you could possibly use on that OS. Also in Win95. And Win98. But regardless... The UI was very straightforward even then. Open folder. Click icon to run app. It wasn't hard to use. Like you say, the bigger issue was the amount of power we had under the hood. Task switching wasn't perfect but it didn't exactly hurt us then, either. I realised that for as long as I have had a Windows system (all the way up through to my Win10 box though I now prefer xUbuntu)... I always did something that is kind of a holdover from my days of using Win3.0... Instead of using the start menu, I put shortcuts to all of my mostl commonly used apps in a folder called 'Proggy Bin' on the desktop so I can alt-tab to it when I needed to instead of dragging my mouse to the corner. So, in some ways, the old Win3.x UI was more productive in my workflow.

dawnerd 5y ago
There’s been some projects that try to get the new internet working on old computers. One off the top of my head: https://github.com/atauenis/webone https://github.com/atauenis/webone Also saw one recently that proxies to archive.org for that really nostalgic feel.
t90fan 5y ago
> Aside from the whole, well... lack of HTTPS support in any browser you could possibly use on that OS. Also in Win95. And Win98. But regardless... Use a proxy running on your LAN. The proxy connects to the site over modern HTTPS (i.e. TLS 1.2 or whatever) and you connect to the proxy over plain HTTP, or whatever old version of HTTPS your client supports (NT4 sp6 with IE6 supports TLS1.0 or SSL3, as the latest, dunno about win 98), if you make sure to trust its cert.
anthk 5y ago
Install wsgopher and head to: gopher://sdf.org gopher://hngopher.com gopher://magical.fish gopher://bitreich.org Wsgopher it's out there, search for in under old win 3.1 software archives, where are several.
anthk 5y ago
Stuff for Win 3.11. In the Net subdir you have both Gopher and Netscale as clients. gopher://i-logout.cz/1/software/PC/Software/]

dawnerd 5y ago

There’s been some projects that try to get the new internet working on old computers. One off the top of my head: https://github.com/atauenis/webone https://github.com/atauenis/webone Also saw one recently that proxies to archive.org for that really nostalgic feel.

t90fan 5y ago

> Aside from the whole, well... lack of HTTPS support in any browser you could possibly use on that OS. Also in Win95. And Win98. But regardless... Use a proxy running on your LAN. The proxy connects to the site over modern HTTPS (i.e. TLS 1.2 or whatever) and you connect to the proxy over plain HTTP, or whatever old version of HTTPS your client supports (NT4 sp6 with IE6 supports TLS1.0 or SSL3, as the latest, dunno about win 98), if you make sure to trust its cert.

anthk 5y ago

Install wsgopher and head to: gopher://sdf.org gopher://hngopher.com gopher://magical.fish gopher://bitreich.org Wsgopher it's out there, search for in under old win 3.1 software archives, where are several.

anthk 5y ago

Stuff for Win 3.11. In the Net subdir you have both Gopher and Netscale as clients. gopher://i-logout.cz/1/software/PC/Software/]