Building a Classic Windows for Workgroups network

30 thoughts on “Building a Classic Windows for Workgroups network”

• Long time ago at school we have a network based on WFWG, you only need a floppy disk with DOS and novell drivers to start a Windows session in a PC without hard drive 😮…

• I enjoyed your video, as it took me back. My first exposure was working for a technology company where we paired up WFWG and Novell Netware, so you had the whole IPX/SPX thing going on a Token Ring network. Of course, we did this by swapping real floppies, and every so often, you'd have to run for one of the backups because a disk had gone bad, and I learned quickly that you wanted 3Com network adapters to save on time and IRQ/jumper hassles, especially if you had that one box on the network that needed to use a DOS-based client.

  I've got an old test box here from back in the day, and it still fires up and does what it was supposed to do. I've dubbed it the Constellation, after the old Star Trek episode, and it's a multi-boot system with PC DOS 7 (and WFWG), BeOS, and OS/2 Warp. Time has not been kind to my memory about what fun it was to get all that working, especially the network, CD ROM, and sound card drivers, but I'm still chuckling that I pulled it off. The extra treat was digging it out a few years ago and seeing the old registered version of Windows Commander that made life so much easier than File Manager.

  Aside: We said 'net booee" for that protocol. Fond memories of running into bogus scenarios on certification exams where NetBEUI was proposed for a WAN environment — it wasn't a routable protocol.

• I hope you saved all that floppy swapping footage for a future compilation episode

• I still have few 3COM ISA 10MB ethernet card with rj45, bnc and 15pin connector from old times, few with only rj45 i used in AT PC with W95. Then was time for PCI 10/100M i remeber 3com 905C(X)-TX-M with cable for WOL very expensive card that time but used in various ATX PC with W98SE, W2000SP4, XP, W7 until 2015. After that got motherboard with integrated 1GB rj45 but still have that card just for case.

• Have a happy and safe holiday. Love your content, it's great content to satisfy hunger for retro tech videos.

• WFW 3.11 was a MASSIVE performance improvement over Windows 3.1 back in the days before Windows 95. Pretty much everyone I knew moved to it even if they didn't need the networking capabilities.

• At 21:38 "my" first laptop a Bondwell Model 8 a 8088, dos yours have the modem on the motherboard?
  Here in Sweden were the modem NOT mount on the motherboard.
  Thanks for a nice video.

• peace be upon you sir and zamzam water

• Random question, as you cloned the "VMs" did you give the 2 NICs different hardware Mac addresses as they can cause issues as it thimks it's the same network card

• Interesting, I've never heard about WWG 3.1.

• Winpopup was so interesting, you could mess with your friends by creating masses of popup messages sent to everyone on the network. Tons of fun!

• Half a video I have been fighting my memories. And then boom… 3.11 😂

• Entertaining video detailing 3.x networking. A bit before my time, but I like to see the genesis of some ideas which continue today and I love the visual look of older MS config and control panel type applets.

• I now wonder how did it all interact with Windows NT. WfW 3.1 predates NT 3.1, but WfW 3.11 was released after it. Maybe it has something to do with the addition of the logon utility? It would be nice to see a follow-up with a network of WfW clients around an NT server 🙂

• I really could use someting like this old MS Chat today. I like how minimalistic it is. Just exchange text messages over LAN.

• I'm surprised that Schedule+ can handle dates until 2019?? I thought it would have ended in the year 2000 or 2010.

• The intel pro 100 and pro 1000 (100mbit and 1000mbit) pci cards also have dos/win 3 drivers and works great. I have a 1000 in my 486 and kinda seems rodiculous to have a 1000mbit ethernet on my WfW 3.11 / NT 3.51 computer lol

• Brought back memories. However it also brought back nightmares. The TCP/IP stack killed performance.

• Were you ever able to source a token ring system?

• Really nice video, i remember networking WfW 3.1 back in the early 90s, then WfW 3.11 and this is what started my career in computers as a lot of businesses needed networking done and i just offered it at a cheaper price than the others so i got a lot of work doing this, so its good to see this again. Have a nice time off for your summer break and cant wait for the next episodes.

• Great vid! Blast to the past as usual

  Albeit is prounounced all-be-it

• The big problem I always saw was it allowed anybody to setup a network. So the thing pointed out in the video was lets share drive C. The next best thing was to turn off the machines at night and when turned on in the morning. A few would connect if drive letters was used. I never did figure this out. If you rebooted the shared machine. Then load your program. It would not connect up. (this followed into windows 95). You would then have to click on the computer in network or even reboot if using a drive letter. But what I consider superior software like Lantastic. Had no issue with it. On all point aside though. I did have a really nice WFW setup with simple dos workstations using a boot disk to run a point of sale program. Far cheaper the other peer to peer networks. Plus a simple lesson for the customer was all that was needed to explain the main machine needed to be up first or on. Mostly left on due to the tape backup in it. Work for years without an issue. Such a money maker even up through windows, xp and even 10 due to security changes.

• Interesting you mention MS competing with 3com at time. And ironic that Windows NT LanManager (SMB/NetBIOS) stack actually comes from 3com (licensed source which later was bought all rights completely). Many of the best technologies on Windows NT are "acquisitions" and "friendly leases" (sic) from 3rd party vendors, including NT itself (DEC Prism).

• Since I prefer to network all of my legacy systems, Windows for Workgroups is excellent for my lower-powered machines that can't handle Windows 95. And you're right, loading any of the networking components from DOS will eat through Conventional memory so quickly! It is better just to run the networking from within Windows and take advantage of all the extra memory available. The only downside to that is needing to load Windows to access any network shares, but since WfW performs quite well, it's not too much of a bother.

  Can't wait to see your next video in the series!

• Back when I did Y2K work, our office network was mostly WfW. I remember Mail and Schedule+. We switched to Eudora Mail after. Colour text! Woohoo!!! 😁

  It was clunky by today's standards but it worked. Good video!

• We were running IPX/SPX by the early 90s due to games and Netware. Always ran dual stack IPX/SPX and 'NetBEUI' because running IPX/SPX by itself would never resolve computer names. IIRC, file transfers were faster if you had IPX/SPX running because NetBEUI is not great… I think it always uses broadcast frames.. not sure exactly. It's been a while.

• In the early 2000s I had an old printer hosted on Windows Xp that I was able to send documents to from a machine running 3.11 (using TCP)

• You can check out my videos on how to do Remote Desktop and Windows file share between Windows 3.1 for Workgroups and Windows 11.

• Windows for Workgroups always reminded me of a Dave Barry joke, where he surmised that there must be a "Windows for Groups Who Mostly Slack Off".

• EXCELENTE! 👏🏻 Saludos desde Argentina 🇦🇷

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