Saturday morning we launched the new guest registry station powered by a 1993 Dell Dimension XPS 466V computer. Sporting Windows For Workgroups (Window 3.11), this system is connected to the WWW through a 1992 SMC Elite 16 Ethernet card. The registration form is connected through the WWW via our Xfinity service, just like any other PC on our network in the shop. Windows 3.1 requires a Winsock to connect to the Internet, and does not have multitasking capability, generally-speaking. For example, before Windows 95 one could not have background processes like separate email software to check for new messages while also running Netscape. In those days Netscape supplied POP email through it’s browser to kindof allow for simultaneous email delivery while browsing the web. When I was writing Internet applications then I used to piggy-back one Internet-facing process after another in succession as a set of scheduled tasks, but this this method was slow and caused the system to hang temporarily. RAM allocation was also an issue.

Guests using the “new” registry enjoy surfing the web as it was then – no tables, no CSS, no javascript, no SSL – just basic HTML and simple graphics. If you wish to learn more about how to configure this Dell computer with Windows 3.11 visit our writeup on vintagecomputer.net

Stay tuned, I plan to spruce up this web site 1995 style. I worked as a web designer then and remember well those days 🙂