Someone managed to save the Word 2.0 demo executable, and a few files to do with it, but not the install. It appears to work ONCE per session, and if you launch word twice it’ll destroy the install… Very strange.
But for anyone looking for a demo copy of Word 2.0, along with Excel, Powerpoint & Schedule, it’s right here.
It runs great in DOSBox, and really if you use these for a few minutes, then try the later ones, what are you really missing?
Well today Internet Explorer 9 has been released… I guess they timed it for the pi day thing yesterday (3/14!).
You can find all the languages & versions here.
So how does it perform? Well the CP/M Javascript page doesn’t work at all in IE9 mode. In compatability mode, it can’t execute commands with an argument so booting or loading disks seems not to work. It’s such a shame.
The javascript NES emulator not only works, but seems to perform pretty well I get just under 60fps. Oddly performance is just slightly slower then Chrome, yet the sound in IE is far smoother. That was really unexpected, but still interesting.
Outside of that, I’ve only used it for 10 minutes now so I really can’t say. But we all know that for better or worse, IE always holds the largest ‘surface area’ so it will remain the most targeted. But for now it’l be fun to play with, but I’ll be lery of remaining on it.
So while browsing around k7tty, I came across this file, internet.zip, that pretty much has everything you need for a windows 3.1 machine to get into the internet using Trumpet Winsock.
I used a packet driver, along with Qemu’s built in ne2000 and it works pretty well!
While I never used Trumpet back in the day, setting it up for LAN access was pretty easy, and while Trumpet 1.0 loads on Windows 3.0 I never could find any applications that actually work with it. Trumpet 2.0 seems more along the line of the finalized Winsock 1.1 stacks, with applications abound to run with it and Windows 3.1
China & Technology
This time I’ve had over 1,400 Windows 2000 users with IE 6.0 download the ‘full’ binary build of Qemu 0.14.0
119.166.31.202 – – [12/Mar/2011:23:53:33 +0000] “GET /install/qemu-0.14.0.zip HTTP/1.1” 200 13320793 “-” “Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0)”
Like this….
# cat install-access.log|grep ‘ MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0’ | wc -l
1403
Honestly I don’t see why they do it, so I’ve pulled the download. I really don’t see the appeal of it, and most anyone who cares about Qemu will be using the x86/x86_64 stuff anyways.
I came across this page, while hunting down the source code to WinVN before NASA’s Kennedy Space Centre picked it up.
Do you remember those old movies where the news is coming across the ‘wire’? Or better they are using the wireless?
I’m not sure if they still do broadcast over the air, I suspect they do, but you’ll naturally be required to have all kinds of special radio and teletype equipment. Which naturally takes times, money and effort. And my attention span is WAY too short for that kind of thing.
To get this to run, I’m using VLC, and MMTTY. If you don’t want to go deaf, or you don’t want the ‘full’ experience, then I’d suggest Virtual Audio Cables.
So basically it works like this. You can click on one of the two links below and
http://65.243.191.51:8000/listen.pls
http://65.243.191.51:8030/listen.pls
Which will then kick off your streaming audio player… If you can withstand the noise, crank it up so your microphone picks up the noise… 🙂
Then launch MMTTY and it will listen on the microphone, and suddenly start to translate the bauddot!
mmtty in action
If you have issues, or wish to finagle the audio devices, or perhaps to use VAC so you don’t have to listen to it, first set VLC to use a different audio output (Tools -> Preferences) then I used the Direct X output feature so I can specify which audio card to use.
VLC audio preferences
Then to configure MMTTY, go under Options -> Setup MMTTY, click on the sound card tab, and you can set the input.
mmtty preferences
And there we go.
The Itty news feed is user driven, so feel free to get the mailer mentioned on the page, and try to submit some news.
There is a lot going on today, esp with the earthquakes that are ongoing in Japan, and the unrest, and populist uprisings in the ME.
But now you can ‘enjoy’ the news in a really old fashioned way.
FORTRAN Dungeon on Windows 3.0 Demo
So with a little pushing around I managed to create a stand alone version of dungeon (zork) for Windows 3.0 . Naturally this version doesn’t require windows, just some kind of MS-DOS system with a 80286 processor, and either EGA or VGA graphics card. I guess I could have tried some CGA/MDA love but I didn’t.
So for anyone wanting to have some fun with an ancient box, I’ve provided both floppy disk images, and an install directory source to install this. It’s kind of funny how 7zip can get another 50% on the Windows 3.0 compress utility.
Otherwise it’s like the other Windows Demo/Working model software..
Text based installer…
GUI Installer
And the desktop.
This is the old f2c version of dungeon/zork I ported ages ago. Oh and thanks to the magic that is jdosbox, you can testdrive it from a Java enabled pc just by simply clicking here.
A friend of mine let me know that there is a current drive by former users of trumpet winsock to actually send the author the $25 ($35 in adjusted money) that he had asked for the shareware program. While I’ve seen Trumpet, it required a SLIP or PPP connection which I just didn’t have back in 1993/1994 timeline. Sure there was SLiRP, but it was far more involved to compile on the Ultrix machine university gave us access to, or the pay internet connection (sefl.satelnet.org!) that ran IRIX. So I ran Troy Rollo’s Twinsock.
Besides being GPL’d twinsock proxied the socket access from your Windows 3.1 computer, and ran the requests on the Unix host you connected to. The best part is that they didn’t have to know that you even ran it. Twinsock transformed the internet from being a Unix shell account that kept many people away, into a graphical experience with windows applications executing on our desktop. Since it wasn’t a real TCP/IP stack, it effectively firewalled us, and seeing we were running Windows 3.1 that was a good thing.
So to make this experence more… realistic, I took the 386BSD 0.1 image from sourceforge, and made one tweak into how it runs. I added the following to the Qemu execution:
-serial tcp:127.0.0.1:4445,server,nowait
Then I installed MS-DOS, Windows 3.1, a terminal program, and some tcp/ip programs to test into another Qemu virtual machine. I then connected the two Qemu instances like a null modem like this:
-serial tcp:127.0.0.1:4445
This way COM1 on both machines now talk together. The only major downside I’ve seen is that if the client VM is killed re-starting it doesn’t get the serial connection working, both VM’s have to be restarted from the command line.
The cool thing was I was able to use a dos terminal program and zmodem to transfer the source to 386BSD to build. Surprisingly this part went pretty smooth on all the versions of Twinsock that I tested, but version 1.3 and higher was the version that actually worked.
So with the executable built on the Unix machine, you launch the windows program, which included a minimal terminal program. And from there you can dial up, login to your Unix account, then launch the twinsock Unix component and the window minimizes and now you are ‘connected’.
Launching Twinsock
WinVN
One of the most popular programs & protocols of the “early” internet was NNTP or Net News. Net News transitioned the world from BBS’s and Forum Software. The topics were incredibly diverse, and the system was distributed by nature. And news traversed the internet in a semiquick fashion. Especially the nodes that had T1 or faster access at the time. Unlike down stream UUCP BBS’s that may only take a small feed once a day, now with Twinsock you could get whatever groups and feeds you wanted, and as fast as your little modem could download it.
So for this fun experiment, I downloaded a suitably old version of WinVN, 0.92.1. The first thing I went looking around for was a public NNTP server. A great resource for locating various news servers that have certain groups is newzbot.
So with a suitable server in hand, I was able to connect up and check a news group. It was slow and clunky like it was in the old days, but it was neat in that client server feel to know that it was running on my desktop.
MS Telnet
Naturally it wouldn’t be the internet if you still telneted all over the world for MUD’s, and even access to compilers, different systems, and school work. I had a chore of a time finding a ‘good’ telnet client, so I ended up settling with the one that Microsoft had released their own stack, ‘Wolverine’ as part of a TCP/IP protocol update for Windows for Workgroups. This stack was also significant in that this was the first time a ‘full’ and ‘real’ TCP/IP stack had been released for free. As mentioned above with Trumpet winsock, and the rest, you had to buy the network stack. This free stack was only meant for LAN access, though I’ve heard of people trying to hack PPP/SLIP stuff at the dos level, but again it wouldn’t help me, since I couldn’t SLiRP. But this was the forshadowing of how the internet was going to finally take off, and the short thriving window of 3rd party TCP/IP stacks for Windows was about to slam shut in the next release of Windows.
Mosaic 0.7
And finally we come the program that basically changed the way we do everything – Mosaic. The first web browser only worked on the NeXTSTEP, and I don’t think that Mosaic was the first PC browser, but at the time it certainly was the best. I loaded up an old version to see if it could at least hit a site by IP address, and it worked. Sadly downloading files causes the browser to crash. Mosaic was rather touchy back in the day too. Because Mosaic came from the Unix world of browsers it was a 32bit program, and needed large amounts of memory. It also was a large exe too, around 2MB! Which is far larger then doom & the dos extender! So Mosaic was the first program I can recall that needed the magical Win32s add on. I’ve mentioned Win32s before so I won’t go on and on, but like the TCP/IP from Microsoft, this also basically killed the DOS Extender market.
The first time I saw Mosaic, I was blown away, we left the world of terminals and archie/gopher/veronica to something you could use a mouse with, and enter in your own URL! It was amazing, but at the same time I thought the internet was doomed to failure as you had to READ. Oh how wrong I was to be shown later. But in the time between Windows NT 3.1 and Windows 95, there was a lot of reading expected to be done. Much like everyone at the time would reply with RTFM in the news groups for stupid questions, why there even was the “Big Dummies Guide to the Internet“, thankfully made available online, put on various shovelware CD’s and saved thanks to cd.textfiles.com.
I couldn’t get MiRC to work.. I forget what other IRC programs would actually work with Twinsock. But I didn’t spend that much time on IRC.
Oh well, that is how the internet stood in that pre Windows 95, pre wide scale PPP world. It really was amazing how fast things changed.
Oh no!
For anyone who’s been using neko x64 on Windows Vista or Windows 7 and seeing something like the above, it turns out the fix was really easy and really simple. As mentioned by mikesword221, all you have to do is make it ‘always on top’.
Just right click on the cat in the task bar (he may be hiding, check under the up arrow…)
And make your settings something like this:
Configure Neko
Then hit ok and Neko will now look normal, with no more ghosting.
Later on I’ll have to make an installer, and fix it so that neko is always on top.
Glorious Neko returned!
With the dawn of Windows 2.x there was some push to make Windows a ‘runtime kit’ or basically Microsoft would let vendors ship a stripped down version of windows with their application to get people used to the idea of Windows. Back in the 1.x & 2.x days nobody really used it full time, but it was more so for the one or two applications of the time that needed it.
Adobe Pagemaker was the first application to take advantage of this runtime version of windows, but with the introduction of Windows 3.0 it was the end of the runtime version.
However Microsoft did have a ‘working demo’ version of Windows 3.0 . I still haven’t been able to track this down, however I have been able to find working demos of Power Point, Excel and Schedule.
So let’s take a look at this little thing, shall we?
For anyone who want’s to check it out, you can download this file, which has the whole thing setup. If you want to install it yourself, you can find what I’ve found so far here.
I’m running this under DOSBox, so I don’t have to worry about copying files in & out, or redistributing any operating system, like MS-DOS.
As you can see from the MS-DOS setup, it looks pretty similar to the Windows 3.0/3.1 setup that we all know.
And just like 3.0 / 3.1 there is also a graphical phase.
Once the setup is complete we run this demo as ‘windemo’.
As you can see it looks just like Windows 3.0. Well for the most part it is Windows 3.0 .
And as you can see, the demo executes in 286 protected mode, giving us the maximum 16mb of ram.. Not to bad for a demo.
So we get a limited version of Excel 2, that is good enough to test out some basic stuff.. Or for basic people it’s really all you would ever need. And yes the model will let you save, print, and do a simple graph. I think that is what the bulk of people with Office 2010 do anyways, here you go, and for FREE!
Next is Powerpoint 2.0 I’ve never been one for presentations myself, but here is a ‘hand tiger’.. I’ve never gotten why the clipart is so .. clipped, but there you go. Sorry no Ligers.
And finally Microsoft Project 1.0 The tutorial is lubriciously missing. Perhaps there should have been some kind of written pamphlet that accompanied the disk? Also see the conventional memory? This screams Windows 2.0 application.
Of course the working model of Windows 3.0 will not let you run ‘normal’ applications. But exiting, and copying the application to ‘progman.exe’ will get you there.
This is my f2c port of dungeon (zork) to win16, running on this minimal environment without issues.
Who knows there may be enough windows there to host QuickC for Windows. I haven’t tried, I have a real copy of 3.0 so I’ve not worried. But for you other people……
If anyone has a working model of Word, let me know…
MIPS at it’s best
Over the last few days, I’ve received a few ports of some software for Windows NT 4.0 MIPS, that I am sure the rest of everyone will be interested in.
The first one provided by nandhp is lynx, the text mode browser! While it may not seem like a super big deal, it *IS* a http 1.1 compliant browser, and it is more useful then Internet Explorer 2.0.
The next, also by nandhp is putty! So now you can ssh out into the world!
I’ve also received unzip & gzip for handling compressed files.. .No word on a tar yet. For now I’m using gnutar for MS-DOS.
And finally I took my quakeworld for MS-DOS with some of the SDL parts merged in to provide a preliminary QuakeWorld for the MIPS.
What is more cool, is that there is still people out there playing Quake. I suspect the non intel numbers are pretty low.
At any rate, enjoy!