Early days of TCP/IP on the desk (was Re: Microsoft Online)

Where I worked in the early 90's we used Win 3.x and Novell Netware for networking. My first home network (and that of my friends) was playing DOOM over coax using Novel Personally Netware. It was a while before everyone I knew went to TCP/IP networking at home. Once NT 4 came out everyone was using TCP/IP at companies for networking and started dumping Novell. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Shoppa, Tim" <tshoppa at wmata.com> To: <cctalk at classiccmp.org> Sent: Friday, February 25, 2011 1:50 PM Subject: Re: Early days of TCP/IP on the desk (was Re: Microsoft Online) I came from the academic side where Ethernet networking had been standard for some time by the mid-90's and getting networks of VAXen and Suns to interoperate was a breeze. In contrast the mid-90's era focus by consumer OS's (read that as "Windows and bolt on products") on the modem as the lynchpin in networking, was simply bizarre to me. By that time on PC-clones with MS-DOS we had been using the NCSA stack for Telnet and FTP and all the other good stuff, for many years. Completely stable and just worked. I was especially fond of a simple configuration of MS-DOS Kermit. I was completely stumped by Windows 95 networking and Trumpet Winsock. They made it a zillion times harder. To this day whenever I have to configure Windows networking and am forced to click on all the variations of "No I don't have an ISP but I can still connect to the internet" I still become enraged. Tim.