The Windows 3.x Showcase

My colleague recently had to troubleshoot an amiga app controlling an industrial press, running in an emulator.

Windows for Workgroups 3.11 had their Netbios network protocol support + drivers but you needed additional packages for TCP/IP. At that point most of the games used IPX protocol so you needed another DOS network stack like Novell's for gaming. If my memory serves my right, Duke Nukem 3D had Netbios support but all the other games (Doom, Descent, Warcraft 2 etc) used IPX.

We have a working networked version of Windows 3.1 that runs in this environment, but let's do one thing at a time.

You're correct that DOS itself (MS-DOS, at least) has no networking support, but you might be surprised to learn that DOSBox does natively have networking support - in more ways than one.

On the DOS side of things, you can configure DOSBox so that one instance acts as an IPX 'server' - a server that other DOSBox clients can connect to in order to form a virtual IPX network over UDP. Programs running under DOS would then be able to use the IPX network - especially useful for games, as back then IPX was typically the only kind of networking available.

DOSBox also has support for emulating modems, tunneling the communication over TCP. It does this by allowing the Hayes dial commands to accept IP address/port combinations corresponding to the DOSBox client on the other end (which would have been set up as a server), which many programs would then just accept without validating them. In the event that a program did validate them and not let you enter anything except numbers, you can still do it by padding the numbers with zeroes. For example, if you wanted to connect to 192.168.1.45:1234, you could 'dial' 1921680010451234. Many modem games can then be played this way without having to use any DOS networking support.

Microsoft released 16bit TCP/IP drivers for win3.11 as downloadable package, you can use that with Netscape Communicator 4.0 or several versions of IE. Unfortunately almost no web servers support clients that don't send the "Host:" header, so additional proxy servers may be necessary to get anywhere. Also, you can pretty much forget about modern TLS.

> To qualify for the exception, your library or archive must: [...]

> Produce no more than a single reproduction of a given work.

Copyright law would consider the Internet Archive to be reproducing the software every time someone clicks the link and their browser downloads it, so this wouldn't apply.