Internet Explorer
So I was looking for an old favorite of mine, Internet Explorer for OS X, and I found this site, internetexplorermac.org
While it doesn’t have a lot of information about this old abandoned and PowerPC only release, it does maintain a download for this old browser.
For all of you, running Intel OS X, without rosetta you can’t run this. Although if you still have Tiger, or Leopard, then yes you can run IE 5.2.3 for OS X.
I got a tip that there actually was a version of Internet Explorer 3.0 for the MIPS. I was thinking there was no way, as there was no mention of this thing as IE 3.0 came out after the MIPS had been dropped from the roster.
Well luckily it turns out to be true.
The original download link is here, and I’ve mirrored it here.
Who knows what other things are out there for the MIPS?
Do you know that crappy thing IE does to jump to MSN to start your page there? Â Yeah it’s still alive, but the ‘run once’ and configure your wonderious MSN session is.. kaput.
It figures, Ie is finally becoming usable over a remote link thanks to bandwidth, and someone turning off the old MSN hooks.
Thanks Microsoft!
That’s right, Internet Explorer 10.
Yes they did just release 9, but they are already working on version 10! So right now you can download the ‘test drive’ version of Internet Explorer 10 right here. And if you are on Windows I’d recommend it for the ability of the test drive to quickly change rendering engines.
Holding down the alt key, and pressing 5,7,8,9,0 will let you choose IE 5-10. But notice how IE 6.0 is left out? I wonder if this has anything to do with it?
At any rate, I loaded up a Windows NT 4.0 VM with IE 5.5, and precoded to install IE 6.0 out of solidarity.
Thankfully they haven’t pulled the plug on new IE 6 installs. Yet.
So rest assured you can load up IE6, and hit MSN for your daily Paris Hilton fix. Which initially I was about to joke about and.. well. There you go. Like some things, neither one of them will go away.
So what is useful about being able to quickly shift rendering engines? Well if you still have any Virtual Server 2005 installs, is that you have to admin them from Internet Explorer, and IE 8 and beyond have broken the admin interface like this:
Which makes it impossible to select anything from a drop down list, like ISO’s, networks disks etc..
But now with this version of IE10 you can quickly known it down to IE 7, or 5 and get…
The interface the way it was meant. And it’s far easier to navigate with alt keys a native app, then something in a VM.
So today is 10×10 or … ten years of OS X 10.0
I know that is confusing, but the 1.0 version of OS X was released in 1999. I should have saved the receipt, but I still have the box.
It does go without saying that OS X changed apple, as it FINALLY integrated the NeXTSTEP OS onto the consumer level machines, and propelled Apple to the #1 spot for the Unix market. Yeah take a step back with me here, and look at the market like this. Apple ships more computers in any given year then HP/SUN(Oracle)/IBM ship that come preloaded with a UNIX. Not to mention Apple also loads their UNIX is the core of the iPhone, iPad, and some of the iPods. Wow imagine that, Apple brought UNIX everywhere. And made it so buried under a UI 99% of the users don’t even know it’s there.
That’s pretty snazzy, isn’t it?
So 10 years ago today, Apple finally shipped 10.0.0 . And let me tell you it was rough around the edges. I had an iMac and at the time I LOVED it. In between the 1.0 & the 10.0 I had bought a G4 and was disappointed that 1.0 wouldn’t run on my beloved G4. I had no intention of running OS 9, but that’s all it could run. So in those fleeting months I managed to run windows 95 on SoftPC (SLOW!) and even got my hands dirty on OpenBSD for the PowerPC.
OS X really made a splash with usable applications that shipped with the OS. I know the nerds hate iTunes, but damn, it’s something a user can use. Same with Mail, and even Microsoft Internet Explorer.
So enough with the reminiscing, I’m sure you want to see it run under some kind of emulation, right?
Well the best (if not only) emulator for running PowerPC Macintosh stuff is PearPC. And version 0.4 is about as good as it gets. Mostly because of Stefan Weyergraf’s untimely death.
Which is sad, however I did find with a little playing around, 10.0.0 can boot single user mode from the CD.
PearPC 10.0 single user
PearPC 10.0 single user hostinfo
One thing was for sure, at the time, 10.0.0 was so.. rough around the edges Apple did give everyone a free copy of 10.1 . And that version certainly better then 10.0! And it runs on PearPC!
PearPC 10.1 boot happy mac
The boot screen, notice the old style mac.
PearPC 10.1 boot thru motions
And the progress bar, just like NeXTSTEP. The more things change the more they stay the same..
PearPC 10.1 booted
And welcome to the desktop.
Well since it does run in single user mode, maybe it could be possible to manually place a 10.0 dump on the disk, but that may take a bunch of time… So for now enjoy 10.1!
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.
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!
So I saw this post on /. talking about the IE 6 countdown page from Microsoft.
So, after helping someone verify the needed flags to install Windows NT 4.0 on Qemu 0.14.0 ( C:\temp\qemu-0.14.0>qemu.exe -L pc-bios -cpu pentium -hda nt4.disk -net nic,model=pcnet -net user -cdrom “\install\nt4workstation.iso” -m 16 ) I thought I’d try this sucker in Internet Explorer 3.0
IE 6 countdown, on IE 3
Hell you’d think they’d at least make the page VIEWABLE in older browsers.. I didn’t even try IE 2.0 just yet, as I almost bet it can’t even pop the page…. Seeing that IE 2.0 isn’t even HTTP 1.1 compliant.
What is interesting is the high numbers in China, India, and South Africa. I wonder how many of those IE6 users are on NT 4.0? I wonder how many IE 5.5 users are running Windows 95? How many are simply using older computers that these new modern titan operating systems simply will not load on.
At any rate, here is the site on IE6 / Windows 2000…
IE6 countdown on.. IE6
Oh well my $0.02 on the whole thing.
This is great news to some of us! Unless you’ve been hiding in a cave, Windows 95 had issues running on CPU’s running over 300Mhz. Any attempt to do so will yield the following error:
While initializing device IOS:
Windows Protection Error. You need to restart your computer.
Then there was an “AMD” fix (that worked fine on intel cpu’s) that would raise the bar to 2.1 Ghz. However beyond that point, the networking would break, and cause Windows 95 to fail with the following error:
While initializing device NDIS:
Windows Protection Error. You need to restart your computer.
Well it seems that the device drivers from the Dial-up networking update 1.4 actually address this issue, however it’s hard to install an update that gets bound into a ‘blob’ when you can’t boot.
However, the LoneCrusader on MSFN has come up with a fixpack!
And it’s simple to apply, just start a normal Windows 95 install (I’m using Windows 95a, the first CD version) and then once it reboots, just boot off the provided floppy image, and it’ll slipstream in the fixed kernel, ndis handler and a bunch of other stuff. Then reboot again, and carry on.
It works so well, that I loaded it on my 3 Ghz P4, however I got this disastrous message:
Insufficient memory to initialize Windows.
Quit one or more memory-resident programs or remove unnecessary utilities from your CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT files, and restart your computer.
Which after a little bit of searching, comes down to the fact that I have 1GB of ram in my P4. A lot of people talk about tuning the vcache as it’ll initialize far too big, and not leave enough memory for Windows 95 to actually operate. I had no luck there, but with more searching I found an easier fix..
Instead, just limit the amount of memory that Windows 95 will initialize. KB184447 talks about this, and I’ve found this works as an optimal setting for my system.ini:
[386Enh]
MaxPhysPage=39900[vcache]
MinFileCache=65536
MaxFileCache=131072
chunksize=2048
namecache=4096
Using these settings, I’m limited to 921MB of ram, but honestly an environment that was built to run on 4MB systems, and comfortably in 8MB of ram, 921MB is just fine. So far I’ve installed Internet Explorer 5.5 on my P4, and all is well. In addition, it works great on Virtual PC, as even some emulators are fast enough that they too run into these old timing bugs.
Naturally, PCI bus users (is that everyone now?) will want this update from intel, (infinst_enu.exe / mirror) which will update a bunch of core components in Windows 95 to allow it to function better. I should add that both on Virtual PC, and my p4, that once the PCI update is installed, I went into the device manager, and removed the default VGA adapter, and my graphics was running correctly. The only weird thing is the ATI Graphics Ultra Pro PCI (mach32) would crash Windows 95 if I ran it at 256 colors, however it works fine in both 16 color and 16bit (65536 color) mode.
Windows 95 921MB of ram
Just remember to NOT overwrite the newer files, otherwise Windows 95 won’t boot anymore.
It seems that the ‘official’ updates for NT 4.0/Alpha on the Microsoft website are long gone… I know that Internet explorer 5.0 will be a part of that SUN vs Microsoft lawsuit which barred Microsoft from distributing any product containing the MS JVM… (like Office 97, IE5, J++ etc…)
However I found a stack of CD’s containing among other things the last updates that were provided for the DEC Alpha platform running NT 4.0.
For Windows NT 4.0 workstation & server users you’ll want Service pack 6a.
Terminal Server users will no doubt want Service pack 5. As far as I can tell, this was the last update to Terminal Server for Alpha users. Also there are MANY WTSALPHA.EXE’s out there, that are ALL corrupt… I was very lucky to have found this on a CD, and I can safely say that it runs perfectly fine on my Alpha.
Finally, on the Service pack 6a CD, there is a copy of Internet Explorer 5.0, and I’m pretty sure this was the last Alpha version of IE released. I’m sure its possible to run Firefox 1.5 or maybe even IE6 via !FX32, but native exe’s are so much the better. Internet Explorer 5.0 contains the standard accessories, namely outlook express, netmeeting, comic chat, and the media player…
I’ve been lucky enough to have a MSDN CD set from 1998, that included the MS Word, and Excel for the DEC Alpha… Back in 1997 when I used a DEC Multia, as a primary machine, I remember how ‘cool’ it was to run Office 97 through FX32, along with lotus notes to do work stuff… But I have to tell you, sure it’s 2010, but having a native version is way more cooler.
Also I have to say the C++ compiler for the DEC Alpha is the buggiest thing I’ve ever seen. The ‘hint’ should have been from the NT 3.5 SDK that builds all the Alpha stuff with the /Od flag turning off all optimizations. I had such a hard time with unzip it’s not even funny.
Luckily Visual C++ 6.0 for the Alpha is way more stable, even unzip will build with the /O2 flags. I can only wonder how much Microsoft went crazy fighting this compiler.. They seemed all to willing to give up on public releases of NT for the Alpha, but rumor is that the Itanium was so delayed for physical units, the 64bit version of Windows 2000 was started on the DEC Alphas… Then finally ‘tested’ with the Windows 2000 Data Center limited availability release…
For what it’s worth, here is the version strings of the compiler….
Microsoft (R) & Digital (TM) Alpha C/C++ Optimizing Compiler Version 12.00.8217
Copyright (C) Microsoft Corp 1984-1998.
Copyright (C) Digital Equipment Corporation 1992-1998
Copyright (C) Compaq Computer Corporation 1998.
All rights reserved.
And the compiler that is on the NT 3.5 SDK…
Microsoft (R) & Digital (TM) AXP C/C++ Optimizing Compiler Version 8.03.JFa
Copyright (C) Microsoft Corp 1984-1994.
Copyright (C) Digital Equipment Corporation 1992-1994
All rights reserved.
It’s funny that there is almost *NO* mention of this 8.03.JFa version… But then I’m sure most people at the time, didn’t realize that the i386/MIPS compilers were on the 3.1 SDK, the Alpha on the 3.5 & the PowerPC on the 3.51… I never did figure out why they didn’t keep on providing these compilers…. But then MS works in mysterious ways at times.
Oh, and I finally benched quake on the console with a 32k video card.. It was just shy of 60FPS! Which for a 600Mhz machine circa 1996 is pretty dammed fast! The fastest intel cpu at the time would have been the 200Mhz Pentium PRO… I actually have one, and I’ll have to install NT 4.0 on that and do a comparison..