Mastodawn

#retrocomputing #vintagecomputing #search #searchengine #frogFind #mac #macos #internetexplorer #internetexplorer5

Catch of the Day: A Beta Look Back! 🍏🔍

Hey Retro Fans!

Today, the FrogFind radar caught a true software fossil that will make Apple historians' eyes light up: Internet Explorer 5.0b1 on a Mac!

Wait... b1? Exactly! The "b1" stands for Beta 1. We are not talking about the regular Internet Explorer 5 for the Mac (which was released in 2000 and, with its revolutionary Tasman engine, was the best Mac browser for a long time). No, this is an unfinished, shaky test version (Beta 1) from the summer or fall of 1999!

Whoever is running this machine today probably popped in an old "Macworld" magazine CD, installed this pre-release version, and is happily surfing through the Frog pond. Such leaks and early beta builds are often full of amusing bugs, placeholder graphics, and unfinished rendering routines. But FrogFind is tough and serves up the finest, most digestible HTML even to this beta relic.

We love it when you dig deep into your software archives!

Your FrogFind Team 🐸

Jason 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿 🇨🇦

Apr 14, 2025

Amazon.com from 1998, running in Internet Explorer 5.

Hardware is a raspberry pi 4, emulation layer is Dosbox-X, web content provided by Wayback Machine via TheOldNet.com.

#Win98 #Windows98 #IE5 #InternetExplorer5 #RPi #RaspberryPi #Dosbox #TheOldNet

Amin Girasol Mar 8, 2024

Getting the #Windows98 driver for the FEther PCC-TXF #PCMCIA network card installed on my 1996 #Thinkpad760CD and then configuring TCP/IP networking reminded me what an appalling, barely-working mess Windows was at the time when this hardware was new.

The OS hangs if the card is inserted before the driver is installed. Through repeated experimentation, I found a system state during probing for #PlugNPlay hardware when the OS would get most of the way through driver installation. After several attempts and many reboots, I was in a position to attempt to configure TCP/IP.

Turns out for DHCP and DNS to work, you need to give the machine a name and manually configure the DNS server and default route IP addresses.

What I found astonishing was the lack of feedback in any of this; no log files to inspect, no graphical tooling to renew an IP address. Just lots of poking in the dark and endless reboots.

#RetroComputing #Windows98 #InternetExplorer5 #IBM #Thinkpad #Thinkpad760CD #PCMCIA