🛜 Remember LAN parties? I do
LAN means "local area network" and it was essentially the internet but locally only in your home or company in the late 90s and early 2000s
So you could connect to other computers to play games or share files, kinda like Airdrop but via a cable and 30 years ago, people would even meet up at some person's house and bring their entire computer (back then a big PC tower, CRT monitor, keyboard and mouse) and everyone would connect to each other
Which is were you'd get all the WaReZ games, MP3 music, etc. cause nobody had internet yet, or if you did it was super slow, so LAN was much faster to transfer files
I know Windows 3.11 did have support for LAN networking via NetBEUI and it "should" work, but of course on http://pieter.com I don't have a network cable that goes to an Ethernet network hub to other computers
But...we could just act like we do?
I asked AI to build a virtual Ethernet hub (a hub routes traffic) that acts like a local LAN, but instead of connecting physical computers in a home, it connects other browser sessions on the internet that have http://pieter.com running Windows 3.11 open at any time, and with DHCP it can assign an IP to every browser session dynamically, so they literally all become part of a local LAN on the internet!
It runs on a virtual NE2000 network card that sends its network data not to a network cable but via Websockets to wss://pieter.com
And it works, well kinda, I just started and its' not perfect, but I'm able to PING in MS-DOS from one tab to the other!
Next is setting it up inside Windows 3.11!
🤓 Another interesting milestone
I was able to connect the modern WebGL Quake 1 multiplayer at http://q1.pieter.com
To my MS-DOS Quake 1 (from 1996) running on my virtual PC at http://pieter.com
Here's the sequence:
You move in Quake 1 -> WATT-32 TCP/IP stack package -> ETHERSL packet driver -> SLIP encode -> COM3 serial port -> Websocket wss://pieter.com -> http://pieter.com server-side SLIP-decode ->gets raw IP -> IP forward in Linux -> http://q1.pieter.com Quake server -> fteqw-sv64 receives package and moves other player

















