[yusina]

Saying "share the internet connection" is quite a stretch though if you just had a terminal connection to some other host which then connected to the internet. I'd associate "sharing a connection" with some (perhaps NATed) IP routing. And they mention NAT, thus my question.

[EvanAnderson]

Based on their mention of "coax" I bet they have a Linux box w/ a modem doing dial-up PPP to an ISP, and a 10Base-2 NIC that they used to attach another PC. The Linux box was doing IP masquerading (NAT) to share the PPP connection w/ the machine(s) on the 10Base-2 LAN.

Having the IBM AT a a serial terminal would let somebody run CLI-based software on the Linux box (like Lynx, an IRC client, FTP, etc). You'd just be using a shell account on the Linux box.

I did stuff like this in the early 90s at home and later at a company I worked at (sharing a single dial-up connection over 10Base-2 with 5-ish Windows 95 PCs).

[grgbrn]

Maybe your association would be different / the terminology would make more sense if you were online in the early 90s?

BUT, it was definitely possible to do what you're describing with some combination of a dialup shell account, a terminal program like qmodem and something like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slirp

[EvanAnderson]

I think running SLiRP on the Linux box and a SLIP client on the IBM AT was probably a stretch, but it's certainly possible. At that point it probably would have made more sense to grab an NE2000 NIC and throw the IBM AT onto the coax network.

[spauldo]

Most network software for DOS was LAN-oriented, like Novell or NetBIOS. Just drive mapping and printer redirection. I'm not aware of a TCP/IP connectivity suite being available for DOS in that era, and I'm not sure how it would have worked given that DOS provided no networking libraries to hook into.

[grgbrn]

Oh I wasn't trying to reverse-engineer his network from that comment, just saying that this was a thing that was possible and that people did at the time.

I agree it's highly unlikely that the AT was running slirp. Wikipedia says an AT was a 286, so it wouldn't have been linux. Not even sure what the options would have been. Minix? Xenix?

[spauldo]

QModem ran on DOS, so the AT wasn't running UNIX. It's almost certainly being used as a terminal.

I can confirm that they did run Minix OK, although I remember the network support was iffy at best. We never got it to work at any rate. XENIX would have been hard to get your hands on. I think QNX would run on an AT as well, although my memory might be playing tricks on me there.

[EvanAnderson]

Xenix definitely ran on a 286. I can't say re: Minix-- I never have used it (though I probably should just to have the experience). I believe there was a Crynwr SLIP packet driver.

[yusina]

I was online in the 90s and I did have a 286 PC. Thus my questions. (That PC was running DOS and didn't have much of a chance to have IP connectivity.)