On Fri, Feb 25, 2011 at 1:50 PM, Shoppa, Tim <tshoppa at wmata.com> wrote: When you were doing that, I was in an environment of VAXes running VMS and Ultrix linked with async lines (lots of Kermit going on ;-) and sync lines (some DDCMP/DECnet and *lots* of Bisync/HASP) since we manufactured Bisync products and had a shelf of sync modem eliminators in our comms rack. When the company flared out in 1993, there wasn't a single Ethernet NIC nor an inch of coax or twisted pair anywhere to be seen. Coming from that, I was happy to jump into an environment where TCP/IP could be found. Yeah... in the late 1980s, my modem was busy pumping UUCP up and down to my Amiga (I helped debug one of the issues with the HDB UUCP port). By the mid-1990s, I had my first TCP/IP network going between the Amiga (via A2065 Zorro-II Ethernet NIC) and a surplussed SPARCstation 1. The modem was still doing UUCP duties until 1996 when I found a device driver for AmigaDOS (telser.device) that emulated a modem over a TCP/IP socket (we had a local "club" that had set up a UUCP calling pyramid, and it was still handy to be a part of that). A very different networking world from the stuff that Byte magazine was covering. -ethan

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.