What the EEVBlog forum looks like to a 486 - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / general

author: Ampera
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 28, 2018, 09:28:28 am
content: Now I could of course do other things like install Windows 98SE and put as modern of a browser I can on there, and maybe with a lot of waiting, hemming, and/or hawing, I could do something crazy like make a post, but I'm not gonna do that. I'm using Netscape Navigator 4.08 which has "support" for "JavaScript" (not by any modern means).Either way, Telnet works. Thanks to Halcyon for sending me the ethernet card to do this, it's really neat to look at my router's management panel and see 486DX4 on there.Any requests?

author: Halcyon
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: February 28, 2018, 09:46:30 am
content: You're welcome. I have fond memories of primary school where we had one computer in the library with a dial-up connection to the Internet, this was early 1990's. Back then, there was no "Dial-up Networking" in Windows, you had to dial the ISP using Trumpet Winsock.There was also something very satisfying about seeing that "Host contacted. Waiting for reply..." message, knowing you're connecting to something on the other side of the world.

author: Ampera
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 28, 2018, 09:48:12 am
content: I'm currently going to try the Arachne web browser which is directly a DOS web browser. Also, the bttfbbs didn't like Windows 3.11's telnet client, so I'm going to try a DOS based one instead

author: T3sl4co1l
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 28, 2018, 10:30:14 am
content: I forget if I ever tried EEVBlog on my Pentium (W95); it's only got a half-broken IE3 or 4 on it, so its view of the modern web is pretty piecemeal.Google search still works, amazingly.Tim

author: vk6zgo
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 28, 2018, 12:50:52 pm
content: Quote from: Halcyon on February 28, 2018, 09:46:30 amMy Goodness, you are but a stripling lad!I thought you were an old fart like me!When I was in Primary School, the nearest computer was probably at the CSIRO or somewhere like that, If there even was one in Oz at all!

author: frozenfrogz
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: February 28, 2018, 02:34:54 pm
content: If I remember correctly, there are DOS builds for the Lynx browser

author: Halcyon
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: February 28, 2018, 11:21:13 pm
content: Quote from: vk6zgo on February 28, 2018, 12:50:52 pmI feel old! Being 30-something in gay years is akin to being a pensioner. ;-)

author: dexters_lab
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: March 01, 2018, 10:35:08 am
content: lol, yea that brings back some memories!back in the early 90s i worked for a software company that made apps for Unix (as in proper AT&T Unix and most of the licensees) and Windows. One of the company owners had a hand in the Winsock API so we had the internet very early for a company in the UK at the time. The only people i knew to email was the other staff in the Californian office!

author: frozenfrogz
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: March 01, 2018, 11:01:57 am
content: I remember my dad as he illegally imported and used a ZyXel 56.000 baud modem back in the BTX and UseNet days.At that time the only legal modem certified to be used in the German telecommunications network was 9.600 baud and you could get some more throughput via data compression - Deutsche Post was in charge of everything communications related back then.Edit: BTX is a German service for screen text communication. The Brits called it PRESTEL, the French Minitel.

author: Ampera
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 01, 2018, 11:47:57 am
content: I always found it interesting how the German telecommunications industry stemmed from the postal service. In the US, of course, most of our telecommunications started with dedicated telegram/graph companies, and exploded with AT&T and the Bell System. Most of our telecommunications companies (with the exception of German Telecommunications and maybe a few others) are almost all direct descendants from the Bell monopoly.I need to get back onto learning German. I'm about half German, and have a lot of reason to learn the language. I know the basics, I just need a better grasp on the minute aspects of the grammar, and then it's just all nuances and vocabulary.

author: frozenfrogz
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: March 01, 2018, 12:14:32 pm
content: Although having pioneered in lots of technical disciplines in the past - right now, Germany is so far behind in terms of mobile networks and fiber optic or broadband in general. Also there are no suitable plans for a (EU wide) decent power grid that makes sense for renewable energy.So much loss on the innovative frontI could go on and whine about politicians bowing to corporations instead of focusing on education and a bright future...Back on topic:I love how it was a challenge to get games to run under DOS! That was a mini quest on its own, needing to stack drivers in the right order to fit into lower memory where every byte counts.You want to use your joystick AND have sound from your Soundblaster card at the same time? Better find a smaller driver for the joystick or ditch the mouse in order to make it work

author: Ampera
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 01, 2018, 12:26:20 pm
content: DOS memory management is a load of shit, but it's a load of shit that tastes like chocolate pudding!I actually had an interesting issue. I, for shits and/or giggles, installed 96MB of RAM into my 486 because I had the FPM DRAM lying around and wanted to see if it would even work in a 32+32+32 configuration (it did, of course, just need one more 32mb stick to max my board). This actually caused some strange things to happen with not only a few poorly coded Windows 3.1 apps (which is honestly expected), but Tyrian, the classic shmup, actually restarted the computer just by launching it. A strange workaround was to enable EMS support on EMM386, but that completely hogged up the UMB, and stole all my conventional memory making any game that relied on a lot of it (Like Civ 1) stop working. Of course the real solution is stop trying to be funny and remove 64MB of the memory. I'll put it back in if I need to use something like OS/2, Linux, or WinNT/9x.If you think Germany is behind on innovation in terms of telecommunications, 90/90 is considered ungodly fast in much of the US. Gigabit connections are such an amazing luxury here, you are actually lucky if you move to a different part of a city to get one.Fiber? HAH! Some places have touch tone dialing as their most technologically advanced telecommunications feature. I don't think there are still any pulse dialing switches still alive though.Don't forget, you can boil a kettle without tripping a 15A 120v breaker as well. No time like the present to feel good about nations that are in the past.

author: dexters_lab
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: March 01, 2018, 01:45:16 pm
content: i remember having multiple dos boot profiles for all the different ways to configure memory for games, it was a nightmare!incidentally the telecoms / postal service was the same in the UK before BT (British Telecom) was separated. You can still find telephone manhole covers with GPO imprinted on them (General Post Office)

author: james_s
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 07, 2018, 10:09:17 pm
content: My first exposure to the internet as I recall was in the library of the local community college my friend was going to while I was in highschool. I remember quite comfortably surfing on a 486-33 running Netscape under what was probably Win95.There is certainly some cool stuff on the modern web, but I have to say in terms of just general information exchange such as forums, photos and accompanying text, there is something to be said for the late 90s style websites. Simple, effective, none of this bring a modern multi-core machine to its knees running dozens of scripts doing who knows what. The average website today is horrendously bloated.

author: IanMacdonald
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: March 10, 2018, 06:22:50 pm
content: Quote from: james_s on March 07, 2018, 10:09:17 pmAgree. The insistence on using a bloated CMS is part of the problem. Although, the drive to make HTTPS and certificates compulsory will more or less spell the end to a free, open Web. It will mean that older platforms simply cannot decrypt the encrypted communications, as some are already finding with the banning of SHA1. It will also mean that your very right to have a website at all, will be determined by the certificate-issuer cartel. A cartel which have shown just how heavy-handed it can be in deactivating certificates because the issuer broke some obscure rule, regardless of the damage done to the certificate purchasers.Of course, all of this is for our own good. Without HTTPS, we'd be sitting ducks for every hacker on the planet.

author: james_s
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 10, 2018, 10:50:59 pm
content: IMHO HTTPS should be mandatory for financial stuff and highly recommended for anything involving credentials or private information, but I see no reason to require it in general. If someone is posting or accessing publicly available information there is little reason to try to prevent evesdropping.

author: SparkyFX
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: March 11, 2018, 12:01:25 am
content: Quote from: james_s on March 10, 2018, 10:50:59 pmIt is not only that.HTTPS- makes it a little harder for spammers/bots to login to a service or hijack a session- it does effectively bypass caching in proxies- (therefore) improves session handling for client and server sideSome of these things get relevant for applications with lots of users concurrently logged in, as some implementations running over HTTP will show stability issues only under high load. But thats just from my bit of experience.Quotew3m ftw., i prefer using it through putty. But yeah running them over cygwin does it too.

author: Ampera
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 11, 2018, 01:51:56 am
content: Well if I wanted to cheat I could VNC into a modern machine and do whatever I wanted. over a 10mbps connection....

author: cdev
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 12, 2018, 10:30:42 pm
content: This is what surfing the net in the early 90s was like.My first connections to the net were all text based and were a lot like the BBSs at the time, there was a sort of gradual transition from locally connected BBSs (I still remember them with a lot of nostalgia.. they were really fun) to "internet"via Unix systems that conected via UUCP.. so email was quite circuitous, using long "bang path" addresses.. .My first Internet browser was a program called "www" but it was buggy as hell. So I switched to lynx which was also text based. (thats all there was at the time) One of my coolest memories is discovering a nifty program called "TIA" which allowed you to turn a dial up account into a full fledged net connection, via some kind of multiplexing magic. I also was a big user of "screen" which was similar except with a shell. (I still use it sometimes)With TIA (a close relative of "slirp", I think thats the correct spelling) I could use Mac Mosaic. Which supported pictures.It does seem an awfully long time ago.

author: kaz911
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 12, 2018, 10:44:16 pm
content: I ran a BBS - Wild Willy's - named after a popular Jeep .. at peak 8 lines in running Opus I seem to remember.hourly mail / forum / file exchanges with Asgaard and a few others. So one could mail someone in the US and it only took 6-8 hours to get there and 6-8 hours more to get a reply!

author: kultakala
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: March 13, 2018, 08:31:09 pm
content: I finally got my ols Toshiba T5200 from 1988 running with a new floppy, Flash IDE disk and a Cyrix upgrade processor (486 core) from 1992.I bought it used a couple of years ago in a near mint condition, only the floppy drive did not work.With 3Com LAN card it is possible to open the EEVblog with Opera 3.62 on Windows 3.11 but... loading the page, even with image loading turned off, takes 5 minutes and is not really usableOn the Plasma Screen it looks like this:Via VGA output on my 32 Inch LCD it looks this way:

author: Ampera
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 13, 2018, 10:35:01 pm
content: I'm gonna have to try that out later. Were you able to make a post?

author: kultakala
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: March 14, 2018, 10:01:24 am
content: No, there is also a problem with a certificate and with some non-working scripts.I will try with a different browser, but... its really no fun, way too slow.

author: Ampera
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 14, 2018, 12:41:37 pm
content: Then again, my 120mhz DX4 is likely faster than your 1992-era 486. I could easily step the generation up and go to my Pentium Pro or Pentium MMX and get it all working no problem, but then it isn't as cool.

author: Bud
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 14, 2018, 01:32:13 pm
content: Quote from: kultakala on March 13, 2018, 08:31:09 pmOh no! Bring tears to my eyes! I had one, loved the screen, nothing can compare with plasma screen sharpness.

author: kultakala
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: March 14, 2018, 01:40:42 pm
content: Quote from: TwoOfFive on March 14, 2018, 12:41:37 pmYours is probably way faster... the original cpu is a 20 MHz 386 processor without any cache.The upgrade processor need to fit into the same socket so it just has an internal 486 core running at 40 Mhz, but is still a 386 to the outside.And the (1 MB ?) cache is not usable because this needs some modifications to the motherboard which i did not do yetAnd i have only 6 MB RAM in the laptop... but its a cool device!

author: Ampera
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 14, 2018, 02:24:40 pm
content: Holy crap, 1MB of cache? I own Pentium 3s that have less than that. Most 386's (and very early 486's) had normally anywhere from 16 to 128k of L2 cache on board, with lower end 386's not being too far from having 1MB of total system memory.Plasma displays have always been something strange to me. I've never seen one, but it just looks like it would hurt my eyes like nothing else. The high colours and low contrast to me just seem like something that would drain my physically and mentally from a day of using it.

author: james_s
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 14, 2018, 04:23:27 pm
content: A photo doesn't really do justice to the plasma display. I have a Compaq Portable III and the plasma panel produces a really nice clear picture which is more of a soft yellowish orange than the deep reddish color it appears in photos. It's actually quite pleasant, much better than the passive matrix LCDs of the era.

author: Ampera
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 14, 2018, 04:24:29 pm
content: Smashing your face in with a metal baseball bat is preferable to passive matrix LCDs.

author: james_s
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 14, 2018, 04:40:25 pm
content: Well it's what was available at the time. Modern TFTs had not been invented yet, and the first time I saw a 386sx laptop with a passive matrix monochrome display I thought it was so amazing that a whole computer could fit into something I could hold in my hands. The plasma screens were very expensive and only came on high end machines. The first active matrix color LCDs cost even more, a laptop with one of those was around $4,000 more than one with a passive mono display. On top of that, the color displays were smaller and almost always had at least one dead pixel. The vast majority of laptops on the market had passive matrix displays, even up into the early 2000's.

author: Bud
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 14, 2018, 04:54:54 pm
content: The plasma screen was soft on the eyes, much better than any of todays LCD.