anyone utilizing early Macs to access the internet?

[Aaron Finney]

The IIfx was (is?) a very capable web-browsing machine. Considering  
the initial cost of that unit, it seems silly to grade it in these  
terms...but I was using a IIfx up until 1999 or so for web/ftp/email  
and it was rock-solid.

Aaron

On Sep 30, 2008, at 8:53 PM, Tim McNerney wrote:

>> I've been told using the compact Macs are an exercise in futility.  
>> But what about the Mac II's? (original II, IIx, IIfx, IIcx).
>>
>> I was just curious.
>
>
> Right.  For a pre-Mac II (e.g. Mac Plus), even Appletalk network  
> file sharing was an exercise in futility, let alone Ethernet.  Until  
> the Quadras came along, an Ethernet interface was not built-in.  You  
> had to buy a separate network card for you Mac II, and more likely  
> than not, it used "thin ethernet" (coax) not 10-base-T.  I did use  
> some 10-base-T SCSI Ethernet adapters for non-expandable Mac laptops  
> around 1975, but they were barely up-to-snuff.
>
> While I was in grad school, from 1997 through 1999, I used a Quadra  
> 700 running IE for browsing the web.  It seemed unbearably slow even  
> then, and I think I switched to Netscape because its rendering  
> engine was more efficient (IE often had to redraw the whole web page  
> twice--e.g. to figure out how big the images were, and on a 68040  
> that was a noticeable delay).  Plus a lots of things have changed  
> since then.  I don't think I even needed a Flash plugins at the  
> time.  Not that you would even think of watching a YouTube video on  
> a processor that slow.  For email I used GNU emacs RMAIL running on  
> my group's Unix server.  I had to abandon it when MIME became the  
> norm around 2000.
>
> Bottom line:  For small values of "access the internet" the older  
> Macs were serviceable.  By modern standards, the old browsers are  
> curiosities at best.  But if you need to transfer some old files off  
> your old Mac, the connectivity is there, and I have been grateful  
> that FTP still works even today.
>
> --Tim

--
Aaron C Finney
Technical Services Manager
WFI Incorporated
626-857-5599 x314
afinney at wfi-inc.com