[handelaar]

I'm not even especially hardware-y myself but am sharing this because I've been riveted for 20 minutes at the sheer joy of this video. And slightly imagining the what-if potential for this thing which was essentially shoving 6Mbps over coax in 1985, had it ever been repurposed circa 1993

[kristopolous]

It doesn't look like you could hit disk surface at that speed with MFM: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ST506/ST412 and the ISA bus was right around there. Removable disk was like 1/100th that speed and you'd fill up a consumer hard disk in less than a minute at that rate.

Programs were small enough that people were typing in hex codes published in magazines (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type-in_program).

I know today we can easily utilize 6Mbps but relatively speaking this feels like it'd be the equivalent to something like 1 Tbps today. I don't know what the home pc user would be doing with it.

[paleotrope]

Seems like an example of being too early to the market.

I mean you had BBS' but what else. Did this even do TCPIP? Windows didn't get a TCPIP stack till 3.11 right?

[flyinghamster]

There was a cable-based serial terminal networking system called LocalNet, which was all over the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign campus circa 1985. The LocalNet modems/concentrators connected terminals and computers throughout the campus. You'd fire up your terminal, hit ENTER for a prompt, then type CALL xxx,yyy (xxx and yyy being hex addresses) to reach a particular host. The host just saw it as just another RS-232 modem.

[nimajneb]

I'm not an expert, but I'm pretty sure you're correct. Interestingly though, I have an PC I got from a college that has Win 3.11 and has a network card in it and TCP/IP isn't enabled or on it. I was trying to figure out how to use the network card, but all I can find are a bunch of other communication standards.

[paleotrope]

I was installing laptops with windows 3.11 for workgroups in the 90s to get the tcpip stack.

https://casadevall.pro/articles/2020/05/exploring-windows-fo...

[smoyer]

Agreed ... You need WFW or a third party TCP/IP stack.

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

I think you needed Trumpet WinSOCK to get 311 on the internet. And there wasn't much other than email, and Netscape to do with it back then. Gopher maybe, but I didn't hear about what that was until it was more or less dead.

[486sx33]

Even then, no dialer, trumpet winsock it was to get online. Win 95 had the first dialer and tcp/ip integration