I was half expecting something about how to get tcp into windows, but this is win95 where they shipped it inside the os and put some company out of business that used to sell that.
Also, Windows did not install TCP/IP components on computers without a network card (most of them until the Millennium era), it was an optional component. You could not “ping” anything, as there was no ping utility, nor libraries it could call. In that aspect, those network-less Windows systems were not much different from network-less DOS systems. The installer probably still works that way (or can be made to, by excluding some dependencies), but it's hard to find hardware without any network connectivity today. I wonder what Windows 11 installer does when there is no network card to phone home...
One of "works fine", "needs a command line trick to continue" or "refuses to work completely" depending on which specific edition of win11 your computer has been afflicted with.
IBM (NetBEUI, no TCP/IP) -> Spider TCP/IP Stack + SysV STREAMS environment -> MS rewrite 1 (early NT, Winsock instead of STREAMS) -> MS rewrite 2 (make win2000 faster):
https://web.archive.org/web/20151229084950/http://www.kuro5h...
With IP you have an address and the means to route the data to that address and back, with TCP/UDP sockets you have the address:port endpoint so the recipient doesn't need to pass a received packet to the all processes on the system, asking "is that yours".
So if there is already some network stack providing both the addressing and the messaging...
You’d still be talking of stuff like IP addresses and the like with it. Probably with the XTI API instead of BSD sockets, which is a bit more complex but you need the flexibility to handle different network stacks than just TCP/IP, like erm…
Sadly no images.