Period Sites in Period Browsers

New Old Stock IBM OS/2 Warp 3.0

Abort Retry Fail has a really nice post on opening and installing a new old stock Red Spine release of OS/2 Warp 3.0.

Now, while I’ve played around with OS/2 Warp 4.0 and 4.52 as part of Period Sites in Period Browsers, Warp 3.0 is not one I’ve yet reached.

And how uncanny it looks! Familiar but alien. Windows 3.1 but not. I should really get an instance of this up and running just so I can really feel – rather than just see – the differences between how I expect it to work and how it does work…

Anyway, I strongly suggest going and having a read of the article and a look at the pretty pictures.

BSE, A 90s Chronology of Events

And here’s another interesting chunk of Archivery via Period Sites in Period Browsers that doesn’t appear to be online anywhere else – A mid 1990s chronology of the BSE outbreak in the UK as published by the MAFF.

HM Treasury Web Server Statistics (1994 – 1997)

Period Sites in Period Browsers has just thrown up another interesting little oddity – very early server stats from HM Treasury’s web server.

Netscape Navigator User Demographics circa 1996

So this lunchtime Period Sites in Period Browsers (PSPB) threw up an interesting bit of history – a brief overview of Netscape Navigator users circa 1996.

Period Sites with Period Browsers – Machine No. 134

I’ve adde another new Browser and OS combination to Period Sites with Period Browsers – Windows XP Home x86 with Mozilla Phoenix 0.1. See it’s first run here!

Period Sites with Period Browsers – Machine No. 131

It’s time to add another machine to Period Sites with Period Browsers – this time it’s an instance of Windows 95 with Attachmate’s Emissary 2.0. See it’s first run here!

Archivery: The Oldest Pages in the Wayback Machine

This is something I’ve been meaning to write up for a little while and, with the success of the Internet Archive’s recovery from it’s attack, it makes sense to do so now.

Getting Red Hat Linux 5.2 up and running on 86Box

A somewhat oddly rendered Feb 2024 google.com in Netscape 4 on Red Hat Linux 5.2. I suppose we’re lucky a 26 old browser can access google at all..!

Introduction

One of my longer-running goals for Period Sites in Period Browsers was to include a good number of non-Windows hosted web browsers and the first stage in that is the creation of a functioning instance of the operating system hosted within an easily managed virtual machine. Unfortunately, whenever I’ve tried to install premillennial versions of linux within QEMU, I have categorically failed.

And, given the lack of guides on the internet, I’m not the only one.

In this guide we’re going to install and configure a working (albeit non-perfect) version of 1998’s Red Hat Linux 5.2. By the end of this guide we will produce a Red Hat Linux 5.2 install with a working network connection and functioning XWindows/Desktop environment.

Period Sites with Period Browsers – Machines No. 99 and 100

I’ve just added two somewhat interesting machine/browser combinations to Period Sites in Period Browsers.

Machine 99 – Windows 98 RTM x86 with Grail 0.6

Grail 0.6 running on the release to manufacturing version of Windows 98. Grail 0.6 is interesting as it’s a cross platform browser written by Guido van Rossum in Python and uses the Tcl/Tk windowing toolkit for display. Was Windows 98 the ideal platform for Grail? Probably not, but it did run and it did pretty well with pre-millennial web pages…