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 hardwar

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.