#plugnplay — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #plugnplay, aggregated by home.social.
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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