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Depends on what period of early internet you are talking about, but non Mac Apple where around and in use during that dawning of the web period. They where a li

by kls 6y ago

Depends on what period of early internet you are talking about, but non Mac Apple where around and in use during that dawning of the web period. They where a little long in the tooth but certainly where in use. Personally when the internet broke out of the Universities I was using an Amiga, then switched to Mac and finally a Next box when the web took off as at the time Next had the best tooling for web-dev and I was still dabbling in Motorola assembly so wanted to stay on a Motorola based system. IIRC PowerPC based Mac's hit around the time AOL was finally offering Web access thru their service. I never used AOL so don't recall for sure, but it seems right around the same era. The BBS type dial-ins offering web access is what really transitioned the net and specifically the web into what it is today. Before they offered access, you had to get a provider (if there even was one in your area), configure your TCP/PPP settings and connect in, it was not just pop the AOL CD in and put in your credit card number. So those services (Specifically AOL and Compuserve) offering easy access really spring boarded a lot of general non-tech users onto the net and started the next era of the net/web.

II2II 6y ago
The Apple II line was very long in the tooth by the middle of the 1990's, but they were still fairly common in schools simply due to their investment in hardware and educational software. There were also people who clung onto to the Apple II as their only computer into that time period. I doubt that many of those machines were ever taken online, and they would have done through via BBSes or Unix shell accounts if they did. The Internet (and the web specifically) is probably what marked the end of 8-bit computers out side of collectors. That said, the experience was okay if you were fine with text only access. Email and Usenet were text only. Then, as with now, images contributed very little to the content of websites so that wasn't too bad either. JavaScript uptake was slow, possibly because compatibility was terrible, so that didn't present much of a problem. Frames and tables were problematic, since they were used a lot for visual presentation. (If anything, I would say that the modern use of CSS for layout makes things better for text mode browsing.) Of course, web development itself could be done from pretty much any computers since it was then a much simpler markup language and there was a lot less presentation related cruft.

by kls 6y ago

II2II 6y ago

The Apple II line was very long in the tooth by the middle of the 1990's, but they were still fairly common in schools simply due to their investment in hardware and educational software. There were also people who clung onto to the Apple II as their only computer into that time period. I doubt that many of those machines were ever taken online, and they would have done through via BBSes or Unix shell accounts if they did. The Internet (and the web specifically) is probably what marked the end of 8-bit computers out side of collectors. That said, the experience was okay if you were fine with text only access. Email and Usenet were text only. Then, as with now, images contributed very little to the content of websites so that wasn't too bad either. JavaScript uptake was slow, possibly because compatibility was terrible, so that didn't present much of a problem. Frames and tables were problematic, since they were used a lot for visual presentation. (If anything, I would say that the modern use of CSS for layout makes things better for text mode browsing.) Of course, web development itself could be done from pretty much any computers since it was then a much simpler markup language and there was a lot less presentation related cruft.