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Comment by spudlyo | Hacker News Reader

Although Windows for Workgroups was largely considered a joke (Windows for Warehouses) I also remember it being pretty wonderful. It brought to Windows all the SMB stuff that I enjoyed from OS2 as well as an actual built-in TCP/IP stack. I was happy to ditch WinSock.

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From the depths of my bad memory; To get TCP/IP in windows 3.11 you needed an extra disc to load up their winsock version.

And it was a shitload better than anything else available at the time.

Are you thinking of Trumpet Winsock? ISPs bundled it along with their software and never paid the original author a dime.

I thought at first they were talking about that myself, but it seems that there was a separate winsock client released by Microsoft for 3.11

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_3.1x#Windows_for_Workgr...

Also, for your historical needs http://www.trumpet.com.au/index.php/downloads.html

Indeed. In the early 90s, it wasn't necessarily obvious that everybody needed a TCP/IP stack. "The Internet" was still essentially academic, and something the average person didn't really know anything about. Small PC LANs typically ran on some combination of IPX/SPX and NetBIOS.

3.11 laid the foundations for modular Windows networking, but included TCP/IP support was two years away in Windows 95, and even then it still wasn't installed by default(!). Microsoft took a while to catch on.

The Microsoft TCP/IP stack didn't include dial-up support until Windows 95, though, so it was useless for the vast majority of home users.

On those days home users were lucky if they had at least a BBS to connect to!

I worked for a placed that used the Reflections TCP/IP stack on Windows 3.x. I recall it working fairly well for that era.

it did, Reflection was awesome.

Attachmate merged with WRQ in 2005, and I believe they still sell Reflection branded products that do UNIXy things, like their Windows-based X server Reflection X.

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