23 Jul
2008
23 Jul
'08
10:24 a.m.
And what was the first operating system to have
builtin support for internet
access? Did Windows for Workgroups have this or was that just LAN
networking?
I'm fairly sure WfW had TCP/IP.
OS/2 Warp had dial up internet
access for IBM's ISP as well as
a SLIP dialer for other ISPs, when released in 1994, but not a full TCP/IP
stack until Warp Connect in 1995. I assume Unix, Linux, AppleOS or AmigaOS
must have had this prior to that?
Unix and Linux, yes. MacOS didn't have built in TCP/IP until MacOS 8
in 1997. Apple had a long history of resistance to reason. It seemed
that for most of its history on Macs, TCP/IP was encapsulated in
AppleTalk packets, even when run over Ethernet, which required that
you have a gateway to strip the TCP/IP out of the AppleTalk. Of
course the gateway software was neither free, nor did it ship with the
TCP/IP software. Even if you had software to direct TCP/IP over a
modem, it probably wouldn't do TCP/IP over Ethernet without AppleTalk
encapsulation. Trying to tie a Mac into a TCP/IP over Ethernet
network used to be an exercise in frustration. Here at the lab in the
late 80s we used to localtalk the Macs together and have a single
localtalk to TCP/IP over Ethernet gateway. It was slow, but it worked
and didn't require as much setup and software on each individual Mac.
I assume that AmigaOS was essentially static in the mid90s. The late
80s versions had no networking included that I'm aware of.
At least for a PC under DOS, free packet drivers with TCP/IP were
available even if it wasn't included with the OS.