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Roland Huisman

Roland Huisman

Veteran Member
Joined
Mar 24, 2011
Messages
1,464
Location
The Netherlands
Hello everyone,

I have an IBM PC XT 640K, EGA, NE1000 machine.

The internet connection works, I've visited the VC channel.
Works very fine thanks to the M Brutman software!

Now I would like to add a tekst base webbrowser.
I've seen some different movies on youtube of vintage
computers displaying internet. I tried Lynx but the exe file
is too big for a floppydisk. And when I try to zip it, the program gives
an crc error. (zip and arj dosversions, both give the same message)


Which browser is the best I can use on such a machine?


Thanks in advance!
Roland
 
Try Bobcat. It's a stripped down old version of Lynx intended for this purpose. It won't be pretty, but it will fetch html and display the text within.

But really, the better way is to telnet to another box and use a browser there.
 
It might be the better way, but alot of us want to do it from out 5150's and XTs and ATs attached to the internet, not through another machine via telnet, that takes away from the whole experience.

Hatta said:
Try Bobcat. It's a stripped down old version of Lynx intended for this purpose. It won't be pretty, but it will fetch html and display the text within.

But really, the better way is to telnet to another box and use a browser there.
Click to expand...
 
Roland Huisman said:
I tried Lynx but the exe file is too big for a floppydisk.
Click to expand...

Can you not us mTCP FTP?

Also, do you have a version of Lynx that can run on this machine? The version I use needs CWSDPMI, but the minimal config only needs about 1.7Meg in total. I put everything needed here in case you are interested (remember to edit the bat), but it probably won't run on less than a 386.

One thing that works fine on simpler machines and can be done off a floppy, is to fetch the page and view it with an html viewer. VH.EXE is only 64K, but there may be others. You can automate it with a batch file.

Edit: If a file is too big for one floppy, put it on two. PKZIP will span floppies, but some dedicated utilities are easier to figure out. Try SLICE.COM (1904 bytes).
 
Last edited:
@ patscc

I tried to zip the exe file by using pkzip and arj.
Both programs think there is an error in the exe file.
But the exe runs on my own PC.
(can't find packagedriver but okay, it's on win XP)

@ Hatta

I will try Bobcat.. Thanks. Maybe it's also a good idea to try telnet.
But then there should be a text browser on the source machine.
What programs can I use to set this up?

But is it like k2x4b524[ says, the experience of running this machine alone on the internet.

@ Ole Juul,
I've downloaded a version that should work on a XT. But till now
I'm not sure if it will work. I will try slice.com thanks. I hope this will work.

I will give lynx a try and also bobcat.

Thanks!
Regards, Roland
 
I just unzipped BOBCAT. Wow, that's a lot of stuff! (reminds me of a Linux distro) However, I grabbed the LYNX.EXE executable and took a working LYNX.CFG file. That's all it takes to run this - well, a WATTCP.CFG file of course too. Three files total. I did this because I was curious about trying another version - particularly one that would run on an 8088.

After snipping the hundreds of lines of text off the LYNX.CFG file and leaving a few bits for reference, it still works and I'm sure it can go down to half a dozen lines if needed. The total zip is then down to 186K. (lynx88.zip) The executable is 485200 bytes so it still won't run off a 360, but it should be OK on a 1.2. I haven't had time to run it on an 8088 but I'm pretty sure the BOBCAT author is correct about that part.

Anyway, this was just because I was curious about the size and speed. It's fast too! Does anybody have another version of LYNX that will run on an XT?

PS: Wayne Buttles also provides the source code so I bet if someone here knows how to compile that, we could have a version that was much smaller. Any takers?
 
Let's be realistic here ...

Web browsing on an XT is going to be very limited and very painful. You can get away with simply formatted text, and maybe small 4 color icons. Rendering tables and dealing with modern CSS is going to be tough. Javascript is out of the question.

One resource that was eclipsed by HTTP/HTML but is far more appropriate for an XT is Gopher. Gopher supports hyper linking. Gopher retrieves content in a manner that is very similar to HTTP. The important part is that the content is generally restricted to plain text, images or binary files. With the right set of content viewers (both built in and external) it can be a pretty good/usable experience on an XT.

I'd love to see a "dark net" of XT class services running out there ... anonymous FTP, Gopher, interactive services via Telnet, IRC, etc. I half started on a Gopher client; that will probably be the next major add to mTCP. After that, it will be time to start finding good Gopher servers (or putting up our own).


Mike
 
Painful or not you should still see if you can post to us from it :) Unrelated but reminds me of RIP vs ANSI. I of course preferred ANSI once it came out but a few friends who were more mouse based users enjoyed the ease of bbsing with RIP menus. A huge pet peive of mine is html based email too. Again, how useless can you possibly make an informational email. I can hardly identify any text outside of the 100 urls spamming the message away from anything useful. Never thought just saying what you wanted in text was such an inconvenience to companies.
 
mbbrutman said:
Let's be realistic here ... Web browsing on an XT is going to be very limited and very painful.
Click to expand...

I agree. One only would do that for the fun of it and as a learning experience. On slightly faster machines (and still vintage) a text browser is still useful. I use Lynx on modern machines sometimes and find it useful for just reading things. You're right, of course, a lot of the web is not usable in that context.

I'd love to see a "dark net" of XT class services running out there ... anonymous FTP, Gopher, interactive services via Telnet, IRC, etc. I half started on a Gopher client; that will probably be the next major add to mTCP. After that, it will be time to start finding good Gopher servers (or putting up our own).
Click to expand...

I like the "dark net" idea too. Unfortunately, the few Gopher servers out there are not a lot of fun, or even very interesting. I'm not sure what it would take to make a few "worthwhile" Gopher sites. That said, I should probably re-check what's out there in case it's gotten a little more interesting. :) It's been a couple of years since I've looked at them. Here's where I'm going.

PS: On my DOS box with a WATTCP Gopher client, I type: gopher gopher.floodgap.com 70
 
Well, part of the effort is putting some new Gopher servers and FTP servers out there to get the "dark net" going. Relying on existing ones frozen in time will give about 30 minutes of entertainment value.

Which WATTCP Gopher client are you using? I've looked at the FireFox extension by Cameron Kaiser, and I started coding my own based on the old RFCs. Is it capable of displaying any graphics formats? (I was planning on skipping that, except for the simplest GIF images. For now .. An external graphics viewer makes more sense.)


Mike
 
mbbrutman said:
Well, part of the effort is putting some new Gopher servers and FTP servers out there to get the "dark net" going. Relying on existing ones frozen in time will give about 30 minutes of entertainment value.
Click to expand...

Yep, that's about it. Though I did find some stuff actually worth reading at gopher.quux.org and I'll be going back there later.

Which WATTCP Gopher client are you using? I've looked at the FireFox extension by Cameron Kaiser, and I started coding my own based on the old RFCs. Is it capable of displaying any graphics formats? (I was planning on skipping that, except for the simplest GIF images. For now .. An external graphics viewer makes more sense.)
Click to expand...

I forget where I got it - probably from fdisk.com. The readme starts like this:

This is an unsupported port of the Internet Gopher Curses Client. The gopher client was ported to DOS and PC/TCP by the Steven E. Newton of the University of Texas Health Science Center Office of Academic Computing. The Lan Workplace and PC-NFS versions were done by Stan Barber of Baylor College of Medicine. You may send email to gopher@oac.hsc.uth.tmc.edu for questions or bug reports. The WATTCP version was done by Wayne Buttles who can be contacted at lynx-help@wsb.champlain.edu.
Click to expand...

If you want to try it, I just zipped it up and put it here. (Anybody else wants to give this a try, remember it needs a WATTCP.CFG file.)
 
I've been looking to put a kind of fileserver up with gopher for a while now, but my problem is all easy installable gopher servers I find you have to build the index by hand.
That is not really attractive with a large directory structure.
And indeed it would be nice to have an XT running DOS do it.

Well if we are going to have a darknet we should re-instate Veronica too :)
 
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