What internet experience can you not get these days with Windows 3.1?

Pretty much everything, going by my experience around December 2006 when I had to resort to using my Emergency back-up laptop until I could get the Desktop PC I was gradually building as a project to keep me occupied rushed into service to replace my previous desktop PC.

The Emergency back-up laptop is/was a Toshiba 220CS with a 133MHz Pentium1 processor + Windows 98, and still only had the MS Internet Explorer (version 3 or 4, i can't remember now) it came with when I bought the laptop used off ebay since I hadn't played that much with it + as it didn't have a CD-ROM drive hooked up to it I hadn't been able to update the programs on it.

Practically nothing worked on it when I tried going to sites with it in that state, only thing that would work was the GOOGLE front page. Social networking sites such as MySpace wouldn't load at all.

Finally got full internet on it after going round to my Grandma's and used her computer (hooked up to Broadband) to download MOZILLA Firefox onto one of my USB pendrive things, and installed it on.

On more recent occasions when my Broadband has gone out of action, and i've had to resort to using Dial-up (you'd quite likely be stuck with Dial-up on Windows 3.1)........ Google again worked fine, no problems...... Facebook / MySpace / Yahoo Answers, etc took so long to load I gave up..... practically only site I could find that worked was GoogleMail (switched to HTML) + the YaBB Messageboards at some of my own websites such as http://www.astronomychitchat.co.uk/html/messageboa... & http://www.webdesignchitchat.co.uk/html/messageboa...

And that was with running Windows 95 / Windows 98 / Windows XP on my various emergency back up PC's & fairly up to date versions of FIREFOX as a browser.

- My Original Desktop PC I bought in 1999, more normally used only as a Monitor stand these days: Evergreen 233MHz Processor, 16MB Ram, Windows '95

- The Emergency back-up Laptop I already mentioned (hooked up to my monitor because I accidently stood on it and cracked the screen in December 2006 shortly after I got the replacement desktop PC up & running).

- My newer emergency back-up laptop: HP NC4010 - 1600MHz Intel processor, 700MB(ish) RAM, Windows XP (sometimes also ditch the Windows on it, and install LINUX over it)

- My last desktop PC: home built.... 3.33GHz Intel Celeron D processor, 1GB RAM, Windows XP (but for some reason could never get my dial-up modem to work on it ready for when broadband goes down, and i need the emergency back-ups instead)

- My NEW desktop PC (brought into action September/October 2009) - base unit supplied by Ginger6.com and upgraded with my own bits: Intel Pentium Dual-Core E5300 @ 2.60GHz (can be overclocked to 3.39GHz just by tinkering with the BIOS)., 2GB of RAM, Windows XP (hard drives carried over from last desktop PC after rest of it quit working for some reason)

I also remember one of the many reasons I ended up buying my first ever PC, and getting Internet at home way back in Summer 1999......... the bloody useless Computers I experienced at the time in Redcar & Cleveland College's library back then when I got sent up there once a week as part of a scheme (computers there ran Windows 3.1 off a Network, and kept crashing after about 20-60mins of surfing the internet... so then you had to reboot the damn things.... then they'd crash again after 15-20mins... thankfully they got replaced over the rest of 1999/2000).

Theoretically you could get a Windows 3.1 machine onto the internet by installing an ethernet card. Something like a 3COM Etherlink III, you would then need to install the TCP/IP DOS drivers off the driver floppy disk. You could then create a wired connection via ethernet connection to an ADSL modem / router.

None of the current browsers will run under Windows 3.1 as they are all compiled for 32-bit Windows (3.1 is 16-bit) and require more RAM than Win 3.1 and DOS 6.2 can address. You should however be able to run a text based browser in DOS e.g. lynx, you wouldn't get any graphics, be able to view and websites that use frames or any active content such as flash based sites so the experience will be very limited.

You can also download files from ftp sites using an old DOS based FTP utility.

Unless you are still using Windows 3.1 and there fore have a modem and drivers you would otherwise not be able to use the internet. You can use the internet with Windows 3.1, people did, in fact people were using the internet before Windows ever came along. I never did so I not sure how people use the internet before Windows unless they use another computer such as the Commodore Amiga, or the Macintosh or the Archimedes. All had good graphics capabilities.

If some-one were to use Windows 3.1 now then they would have no experience with using the internet unless they are a really good (excellent to the extreme) programmer.

Windows 3.1 would not have enough grunt to go onto the internet now. Other than that it wouldn't be supported or be able to run a modern browser required to go onto the internet.

When I had 3.1 it had a 386 DX CPU and was 8 bit, 4 MB of RAM and a 26 MB hard drive, 16 Colour monitor and a Floppy drive. And that was the cat's whiskers and the dogs dinner in it day!

Now the minimum requirement is CPU speed 300 Mhz, OS Windows 2000 Pro,

128 MB RAM, 128 MB free space on your drive, CD-ROM drive, Outlook Express 5.5/6, IE 6 + SP2, an Ethernet card and a SVGA 800x600 monitor with 256 Colours

Windows 3.1 was the first Windows OS to feature a GUI, however it DOES NOT support 32-bit colour as modern PCs do. Using the internet requires at least 16-bit colour for a good experience, and I suspect Windows 3.1 had 8-bit or less. Hence it might not even open many Web pages. And are you still using 3.1??!!!