Older network techs will remember that Windows for Workgroups did not include TCP/IP. My employer bought it from some company and had a volume license.
I just can’t remember the Software Company that sold TCP/IP. Was it one exclusive company? Or did several companies sell it?
Win NT included TCP/IP and I never had to manually install TCP/IP again. I lost that old floppy disk with TCP/IP over 15 years ago.
Anytime I installed Windows For Workgroups (remember those five floppy disks?). My second step was to grab the floppy with the TCP/IP driver. Then I could setup the networking for our campus. DHCP was still ten years away. So that meant I entered everything. The IP number, subnet, gateway, DNS etc. and hoped I got it right. I had a cheat sheet for each department and which gateway they were on. All our pc’s ran thinwire ethernet cable back then.
I also setup NetBEUI the Microsoft protocol that let pc’s talk with each other. We used both protocols until 1998 and then finally purged NetBEUI from our network. Or at least we tried. With over 1200 pc’s it took awhile to track down everyone running NetBEUI.
There were TCP/IP implementations probably over a decade before Trumpet Winsock, the most popular Winsock impelementaton, existed; it was invented in 1973-74 and first used on a large scale when ARPANET began to change over, a process finished on January 1, 1983.
Peter Tattam, the person who created Trumpet Winsock, has been largely forgotten and was never really paid much for his work; this thread goes into a bit of it and links to discussions about it on Reddit and Hacker News.
Windows for Workgroups came out around 1992. Given the history from the 70’s and 80’s, it’s amazing that it didn’t include TCP/IP. I don’t think NT 3.xx had it either. My first version of NT was 4.0 and I know it had TCP/IP.
I recall Windows was really pushing NetBEUI and Mac’s had Appletalk. We had several little Apple Talk networks in depts back then. Plus there was Novell Netware. Which we never touched at our campus. It took awhile to standardize with TCP/IP.
Microsoft didn’t want to embrace the Internet for a good while after they’d had reason to. Gates finally caught on to just how big the Internet was in 1995, well after a lot of companies had already made big moves there, and had to reverse some decisions due to that.
NT 4.0 was released in 1996. By that time, not having TCP/IP support in a server and workstation OS would have been perverse.
Indeed it did. There were many networks and network protocols before TCP/IP, used in all kinds of sites and for all kinds of computers. TCP/IP was just the first protocol to connect multiple kinds of networks to really catch on, and it was kind of slow-growing until, say, 1993, when it quickly began to eat the world.
Wow, I had totally forgotten about Trumpet Winsock. And setting up a SLIP connection with Windows 3.1 via 28.8 modem back in 1992. (What was the driver/utility used for that again?)
All so I could telnet into MUDs (had a dedicated MUD client program called ), peruse USENET with a newsreader (News Xpress) and use FTP. And Netscape for a few of those “web pages” with people’s CS department contact info on it (whoop de damn do) and their demo markup HTML pages with text and pictures laid out.
While I also used Trumpet Winsock under win3.x for internet connectivity over PPP, when Quake first came out, I remember using the ‘Beame & Whiteside TCP/IP Stack’ to play networked Quake over the internet under MS-DOS.
Not strictly on topic, but NT 3.x did have a native tcp/ip stack, even beta NT3.0!
“Obligatory” wikipedia link:
It was easy to add other essential items like IPX and DECNet.
Thing that gets me is that under DOS and early windows, we had to deal with a world of multiple network protocols which ate up all the memory. So when WfWG came along, and NT, with proper installable stacks, delight all round. But within what seems like 5 minutes all we needed was tcp/ip, so we didn’t need what we had been waiting for.
Since y’all are mentioning trumpet, I just have to post this. I’m not asking you to contribute, but the story is interesting.
I also want to add that the idea that the OS could handle this, especially a home OS, was very odd at the time. It honestly seemed like an OS was supposed to be a lot more barebones. Remember, not long after this was the idea that even having a web browser built into an OS was somehow wrong. And of course, in Windows for Workgroups, even having a GUI built in was considered odd–remember, Windows and DOS came separately until NT came out.
We owe the early PPPOE software develops a big thank you too.
I recall my first DSL in 1999. I had to install PPPoE on the pc. I found a freeware one and used it. I didn’t want to run AT&T’s install because it used a special browser and other bloatware.
Today PPPoE is in the router or dsl modem and there’s no need to install it on the pc.
But the early guys who published shareware versions are owed a big thanks.
With over 1200 pc’s it took awhile to track down everyone running NetBEUI.