How To Get Online W/ 286 PC?
 

Here is a slightly silly question, for the grayhair geeks.

Supposing I were to obtain an antique 286 PC. Yup, a 25 year old relic.

How could I get it connected to the Internet? Short of finding an ancient 2400 baud modem and using dial-up?

We get our Net via cable modem and use a 802.11 network in the house. I don't think there's any WiFi cards for a 286 PC with only ISA slots. I guess I could add a wired router. But did PCs even have Ethernet cards 25 years ago? I seem to remember doing everything by sneakernet (running around with floppies).

Any ideas?

(In case you're wondering, this has to do w/ my latest interest in 25 y/o H-P calculators, whose I/O peripherals were designed for the PCs of the era . . . )

3Com EtherLink III TPO (3C509B-TPO) Network Adapter

Hope you have a lot of patience...! :D

I don't think you'll have any luck going wireless. Wired networks were around back then, but not wireless networks.

Randy

you shouldn't have any problems getting an isa ethernet card... I think you will be in driver hell, though.

Can't you use an older, but not ancient, win3.1 or 95 box that has a parallel port or something? Maybe a parallel -> serial or usb adapter and telnet or something?

If that puppy has a serial port, we can get it on the internet.

Are you sure those are even ISA slots? There were some funky bus standards floating around back then.

If they are ISA, get a hold of a NIC card, then connect it directly to one of the ethernet ports on you wireless access point. Alternative would be to do internet connection sharing off one of you windows boxes.

John,

On a 286, you'll probably want to run Windows 3.0 on it. Windows 2.0 prolly won't support enough memory to be able to run the appropriate software, and 3.1's minimum requirements included a 386 MHz processor.

3.1 will run on a 286, I've done it before...long ago....but it is extremely slow. Much too slow to to be productive in any way. Literally taking minute(s) for even the simplest applet to open.

Randy

I'm thinking Linux. But the newer websites will kick your a55, too much stuff going on, images, etc....

You'd be better off finding an old 450MHz pentium or something than a 12MHz 286.

Believe me, I don't *want * a 286 - I'm not that retro. I have a Pentium 166 machine that I tinker with and that is as old/slow as I am willing to go.

But I'm reading that one of the original bits of I/O software for the HP41C/CV/CX calculator will only run properly on a PC of its era, i.e. a 286. Hence my interest.

It must be nice to have so much free time to waste it sitting in front of a box like that.

John,

You have Macs from what I remember.

Try a VM like Q or Bochs.

Scott

How about an emulator? http://dosbox.sourceforge.net

Looks like Q's sql server went tits up.

You can still get the latest build here.

http://www.kberg.ch/q/builds/nightly/Q-0.8.0d1105.dmg

It's a Universal app, it's free and should do the job for you.

Scott