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I wonder what the results would be when upgrading from Windows 95 (RTM, OSR1, OSR2, OSR2.1 or OSR2.5) to Windows 2000.

I could see Billy Coore of The Nostalgia Mall trying this out on his Windows 9x machines.

Nice basement. As is was intended as a bomb shelter, so this could be the next CyberBunker - Retro edition. 😄

In theory 10Base2 was great; in reality it sucked. In the early 90s, Post college I tried being a small business computer consultant. So I installed this in many locations for small networks and it worked perfectly. However, the problem with it was someone in the facility would invariably pull their computer away from the wall (say to vacuum behind the desk) and the RG cable would yank out of the BNC T-connector. "So what?" you young ones may say, the same thing still happens today with Twisted Pair or even Fiber. But no, the real problem with 10Base2 was that because of the topology, the entire network downstream of that point would die ... and the rest of it would get real flaky due to a terminators being gone. Once twisted pair cards became cheap I went almost exclusively to that format despite the fact you had to buy a hub or switch. One exception was a few years later, for a small business with two semi-connected buildings. The office portions were two different structures on the street separated by a loading dock driveway. We strung the RG-58 coax outside across that driveway with 10BaseT + 10Base2 switches possibly the exact same as you had (I can't remember the brand I used).

@THE PHINTAGE COLLECTOR, AWESOME INFO!! I have looked up and down the internets.. where is "SMALLIDE.SYS" from? It appears very small. I would love to try/test it, please :)

is that a cat7 patch cable? haven't seen one if those in 25 years

Every time I wonder how many old computers he has, the answer is n+1.

Wow so the electrical signal was the same for 10-BASE-T and 10BASE-2 ?

You know that Accton card probably was working correctly with the ne2000 drivers but was probably only transmitting on the ethernet connection. Thats the large connector that kinda looks like a joystick connector. I suspect it probably does not work via the BNC connector without the drivers to swich it but I am only guessing as I don't have that card. I do have that kingston card that I got off ebay around 2018 or so and its a fantastic card that can work with either ISA PNP or in non PNP mode. Fun fact is that I think I had to put it in non pnp mode to get auto detected by ancient Linux distributions that I was testing back then. Also for how to interface your 10base2 network to your wider network you could imploy a bridge via another PC or other hardware to go wireless.

Wi-Fi might be problematic with those walls, but you might want to try a powerline adapter. They don't always work even on the same phase, if there's a lot of interference, e.g. from LED power supplies. Since I don't have (yet) networking cables in my flat, I run my retro gear without wifi from a MikroTik hap ac lite. The 5 GHz radio is connected to my main wifi AP, the 2.4 GHz radio is in 802.11b/g mode with WPA (since my main 2.4 GHz network is 802.11n/ax only with WPA2 and WPA3), and I have five 100 Mbit/s RJ45 ports available as well. The MikroTik is configured as router instead of a bridge, so my old gear is on a different subnet. I turned on telnet access to the router as well (only from the LAN side), so I can configure it from any old computer.

Back in the 90s i managed to start with Netware Lite, then moved to Netware 4.11 and then Netware 3.11. I managed to get TCP/IP running under NetWare. However once i got FreeBSD 2.12 running that was it. No more IPX just TCP/IP. With BSD i could share my internet connection and do file and print and run Apache with PHP. IPX was okay but IP was just so much more useful.

Hi, nice follow up video I dont believe you mentioned it but i am sure you would run the dos version of msd.exe or nortons info to verify resources available While you may use the defaults that worked previously worked eg irq10 or c0000 memory base 300 on some machine that combo may not be available on the next machine Some times the memory address eg c0000 is free, but there is not enough free space starting at that register to do what is required I did find the 3c509's to be great dos combo cards in the dos 4 to dos 5 era with novell - SMC's at that time were fine as well Regards George

Fun fact: Apparently the 16-bit ISA 3c509 can also be used in an 8-bit ISA slot. Learned this recently. Mind blown! A rare use case for a 10base2 or 10baseT transceiver with a combo card is if the built in port on the card is broken. I have actually done this back in the days. (Actually the insulated DC-DC converter was what was broken on that card, and for a while I ran the insulated part of the card using an external wall wart :) ). In my experience the old school devices with multiple 10base2 or AUI ports is often too slow to work well with the fastest 10base2 or 10baseT cards. I.E. if you have a 3c509 with BNC and a newer PCI card with TP and connect them via one of those older devices the older device might not be able to switch directions fast enough, making the network drop the reply packets all the time, making things super slow. Meanwhile if the 3c509 are replaced with an older 8-bit ISA card things work fine. In other words, if you want to connect BNC/10base2 with TP/10baseT, use one of those cheaper consumer grade style hubs from Dlink, Netgear or some noname company as those are new enough to work reliably, and avoid even older "professional" equipment. Also watch out for old 10-base-T MAUs as it seems like the oldest ones don't really comply to the 10-base-T standard fully. Btw, the reason for the 50 and 75 ohm impedance of RG58, RG59 and lots of other coax cables are that 75 ohm is the most efficient for connecting an antenna to a receiver, while 50 ohm is a compromise to allow a thicker center wire which is better for transmitters. This is also the reason for why broadcast FM and TV (including satellite and cable) receivers use 75 ohms, while receivers used with frequencies and thus antennas that are also used with transmitters usually use 50 ohms. Can't remember which channel but there is a great video here on TH-cam about why 50 (and 75) ohm is the standard.

I'm excited about Novell and ipx/spx. This is archeology 😄. It's been over 30 years. We had netware 2.2 and 3.12. The actual installation of the server wasn't such a big story. The clients were complex. There were lsl, ne200, ipxodi, Netx and later VLM 16/32. Plus the NetCfg. This was only used by companies. I think, like mine, this is long forgotten. The next Server was Fedora.

I remember having to do this back in the 90s. Such a good video and good explanation too.

It looked like that ceramic cap on one of the cards was split down the middle. I’ve actually had that exact fault on a card and it meant traffic one way was basically useless but the other direction was fine.

Thoroughly impressive 😮

How is power routed into the bunker, is there just a single conduit or a few conduits? If there is a separate conduit for an antenna feed I'd repurpose that, otherwise look into some ethernet over powerline adapters.

My only 'experience' with 10BASE-2 was at school where it persisted to the mid 90s, says a lot about government funding of schools. Of course a popular thing to do was to steal the terminator and bring down the whole network. I do remember collision problems with 10BASE-T though, our early lan parties were in the time when ethernet switches were still quite expensive so of course the only option for poor teenagers was a cheap hub. Any sort of multiplayer game would have the collision light solidly lit on those little hubs and while I remember it working it wasn't ideal, seems silly now given how cheap switches became only years later but that was how it was at the time.

The infomation about the 3com was JUST what I needed to get my Pocket 386 online with an Etherlink III! Thank you SO much for the exccelent content!

Watched from Croatia :) Man, your collection is much more safe than mine! Unfortunatelly it's tou late for us to build such a bunker ;)

I vaguely remember some ne2000 clones were finicky with certain IRQs and/or addressee. IRQ 5 more stable than 9+ sort of thing in DOS.

I always wondered if you changed the oscillator on these old ISA nics if they would speed up or slow down Ethernet speeds. I.e. 16 MHz for 8 Mbps or 24 MHz for 12 Mbps.

What to put into your bomb shelter? Fiber of course.

To many years ago. First of all just do the jumpers and don't do the plug n pray on ISA cards. The IRQ I used was 5 and I think base address of 320. I think midi was 330 and early cd=rom drives not ide was 300. Most was defaulted on IRQ 3 / base 300. Don't worry about IRQ conflict unless you have a 2nd printer port 278/iRQ5. Then normally you could share it and even print. Anyways one of the big things I noticed was people would not use the drivers that came with the card. Thus, why people used 3com cards in say windows 95. Oh, a tip in windows 95 on certain cards. It will get stuck on finding hardware doing windows install on certain network cards. Thus, leave it out until after install. Back to drivers. I can't tell you how many times I would install the drivers and it would seem to double the speed. Yea it would still be 10mbps. But when you say call up a dir of files. It would be fast. Then in windows 95 with tcp/ip say things. Login faster, etc etc etc. It would solve misc. issues when using a generic NE2000 card. I can't tell you how many people would use over priced 3com cards. Just because they could get a generic card to work.

Nice! I've seen PKTMUX but hadn't tried it, very cool. If you need any help finding PCMCIA drivers for the LTE 5XXX you have, let me know. On the Toshiba, maybe do an RPL boot! I have a boot ROM image for the 3c509 if you need it

15:14 wow that card is slow as hell , 50ms , the other were like 0.85ms

Great Episode! I personally use Kingston KNE20T NE2000 Cards. They seem to be the most compatible. My XT dual boots to DOS and ELKS 8088 (Full UNIX Clone) and this card works flawlessly. On the subject of Concrete Walls.... I lived in a full basement apartment with very thick full concrete walls. I tried two solutions: 1. Use Powerline Networking or 2. Use 2.4 GHZ WIreless. The 2.4 Ghz was the winner IMHO. It was easy to adapt an 802.11b WEP to an existing commodity router. Alternatively, you could also try converting a Linksys WRT54G as a gateway. I am looking forward to seeing your solution.

I can recommend TP-link Powerline adapters for getting Ethernet ports around the house using power outlets. They don't require any drivers so work for old systems and Macs etc

I like the fact that Mr know it all is obsessed with windows me

I’m enjoying the series! Brings back memories! I was Banyan, NetWare and Microsoft certified back in the 90’s - Banyan’s StreetTalk was a great directory service and a precursor of both NDS and AD. I loved the Vines “patch” command, much better than the others!

If you have power into your bomb shelter and its on the same mains panel as the rest of your network (ideally the same circuit, but it works same panel) modern powerline network adapters work pretty well. I had some of my IP cameras using these at near gigabit line speeds for a while in my house before I ran proper cat6 to them. They were pretty solid and this was 5+ years ago. If you have cat3 for old phone lines in there VDSL media converters would work too over a pair of copper cat3 conductors. I may or may not have done it over thermostate wire too and it worked fine for a shortish. VDSL is not as fast as powerline, but I think you could still get several hundred mbp/s on a short run. They are more pricey than powerline adapters too in my experience.

Oh wow, that windows network config GUI... the memories! lol