alt Hacker NewsSaying "share the internet connection" is quite a stretch though if you just had a terminal connection to some other host which then connected to the internet. I'd associate "sharing a connection" with some (perhaps NATed) IP routing. And they mention NAT, thus my question.
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grgbrn • 05/03/2025
Maybe your association would be different / the terminology would make more sense if you were online in the early 90s?
BUT, it was definitely possible to do what you're describing with some combination of a dialup shell account, a terminal program like qmodem and something like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slirp
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Based on their mention of "coax" I bet they have a Linux box w/ a modem doing dial-up PPP to an ISP, and a 10Base-2 NIC that they used to attach another PC. The Linux box was doing IP masquerading (NAT) to share the PPP connection w/ the machine(s) on the 10Base-2 LAN.
Having the IBM AT a a serial terminal would let somebody run CLI-based software on the Linux box (like Lynx, an IRC client, FTP, etc). You'd just be using a shell account on the Linux box.
I did stuff like this in the early 90s at home and later at a company I worked at (sharing a single dial-up connection over 10Base-2 with 5-ish Windows 95 PCs).