parasquared
WebTV
Joined: 15 Dec 2025
Posts: 42
Location: Portland, OR
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 Posted: Mon Feb 02, 2026 6:11 pm Post subject: installing and using IBM WebBoy |
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IBM WebBoy for DOS is.. interesting. it's an entirely DOS based browser and e-mail client for Japanese DOS systems, seemingly designed specially for the Palmtop PC 110 (although will run on standard PCs of course). i found it while scrolling on archive.org, and immediately knew i had to try it. getting it actually set up kind of SUCKED, though. a combination of the language barrier as well as using a minimal copy of Microsoft LAN Manager in the backend(?????) which i haven't used myself made it difficult to actually get it functioning initially.
screenshots (or screenies if you fancy):
screenshot of the built-in about page for WebBoy 4.0
screenshot of lesliefield.com (ironically this site made the entire machine lock up after trying to enter)
screenshot of a ClassicConnect reply notification email
setup instructions:
- install DOS/V (it doesn't work at all with a regular copy of DOS from what i can tell)
- insert the first disk and run `install C:\webboy` (or replace that with where you want to install it to)
- the installer asks fairly simple stuff. here's a basic rundown:
- webboy 4.0 has a "feature selection", basically for whether or not you want printing and JavaScript support (which takes up more ram). select the top one unless you need to use less RAM
- screen res; pretty self expanatory
- network connectivity method (LAN or dial-up)
- connectivity settings; doesn't seem to support any kind of auto configuration? (even though DHCP is mentioned in protocol.ini and PPP literally has auto configuration in the protocol)
- it'll ask for a "dictionary file". not sure where this is, but you can skip it without any real consequences
- it'll say something about "12-dot and 24-dot" fonts not being enabled (at least on my setup); no idea how to enable these but they're also optional (if someone knows, chime in perhaps?)
if you need to reconfigure the settings you set after install, you can run `int15ext`then `wbconfig`
dialup via PPP should just work once setup is complete (i was not able to test this myself though. for some reason using the modem in my Toshiba laptop with VMware's serial passthrough causes the modem to behave strangely and never finish the handshake, and 86Box's modem emulation doesn't emulate PPP, which this requires)
for LAN, you'll need to provide an NDIS / Microsoft LAN Manager driver. the program comes with zero drivers of any kind (other than i guess for modems, but that's not a LAN so lol)
- try running LAN Manager 2.2c and see if it has your network card, if not find one on the internet somewhere (is there a shim for packet drivers somewhere? that would be nice since those are easy to find and would be a lot more setup-agnostic)
- in the case of the NE2000, that is included on the LAN Manager disks. install LAN Manager, copy the NE2000.DOS file from `\LANMAN.DOS\DRIVERS\ETHERNET\NE2000` (they are compressed on the install disks, hence why you have to install it) into `[webboy install dir]\NTSDOS` and edit the protocol.ini file inside of it; something like this:
| Code: | [NE2000_NIF]
IOBASE = 0x300
INTERRUPT = 3
DRIVERNAME = MS2000$
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(there should be a protocol.ini file next to the driver that shows you what you need to add; drivers obtained off the internet likely have documentation on how to get it going although they might expect you to use the full LAN Manager to install it as well)
- make sure you load the driver via config.sys too, i.e `DEVICE=C:\WEBBOY\NTSDOS\NE2000.dos` in my setup
as for actually using it, it's about on par with.. maybe netscape 3? although it does have some quirks (i.e it doesn't render basically any styling tags, so things like headers and emphasized text don't look any different)
attempting my typical "old browser torture test" (which consists of hitting random page on wiby.me over and over) showed some semi-major issues; mainly:
- the random page will always return the same page until you refresh it manually
- https isn't even recognized as a valid protocol, so it tries to append it to the end of the current url as if it was a relative page link (i.e http://wiby.org/surprise/https://www.vgmuseum.com)
- if the site itself redirects to https, it also gets confused and keeps appending the link to the end over and over
(why are there even https-only sites on a search engine that's supposed to be for "the old web" anyways?)
- it loves vomiting JavaScript all over the screen if the site has any and it doesn't know how to handle it (turning it off entirely seems to fix it though)
"my boy;; he has the sickly" - me after first discovering this bug
- supposedly you can use a proxy, but every time i've tried it just breaks the browser entirely until i restart the machine
- not really an "issue" but it took me an embarrassingly long time to figure this out: you have to manually save all your settings. click the last option under the wrench to do so
overall, it's really neat, and honestly i think it might actually be better than Arachne (for example scrolling the page doesn't redraw the entire screen), if a bit more unstable. if only it worked on non-DOS/V systems, i would totally use it on DOS VMs and the like
oh and, if you wanna try it yourself, here's the link!
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- parasquared
"In space there is no center, we're always off to the side"
- Ballad of Reverend War Character, Silver Jews |
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