Some day, when I have time to waste, I'd love to try to surf the web on my 1986 PC that I still have ... and still works. It has a 2400 modem.
I have to find some modem simulator, or make my own to hook it up.
Then I have to find a DOS text browser.
It might be fun, but useless, experiment.
I mentioned earlier that I have a 3-Com "Audry" "internet appliance". It was a gift to my Mom, back in...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3Com_Audrey
wiki says the year 2000.
It still works but I don't have a dial-up connection anymore, and to get to Ethernet required a special, USB-to-Ethernet adapter, so I can't do much with it.
It was actually really advanced in many ways, and in some ways far easier to use than today's powerful computers. But the flaws made it unusable in practice. 3-com discontinued them and refunded the money, and didn't want them back. So I still have it.
Pros (and remember, this is the year 2000). Most people were on dial up, you could schedule it to wake up, download the content of a bunch of web sites, it would keep them in memory, and then you could read them off-line at your leisure, by selecting each sites "channel" with a knob, like changing channels on an old TV. Of course they would not be interactive at that point, but you could have the weather, news, stocks, updates when you want, and not tie up your phone line. It would dial in and then hang up when they loaded. You could get back on-line if you wanted some interaction.
Email would flash a light when new emails arrived (it would check, based on your schedule). The stylus was a light pipe, and you put it in a holder which coupled to the light source. And you could just write on the screen to reply to the email, far easier than many email apps today. I think you could record a voice message too, not sure? And a wireless keyboard.
Cons: OMG. We bought the printer, but printing was nothing but a screen dump, no options to it at all. With that small screen, even a short email would take up about 3 screens. And some emails got double line spacing, making it even worse. Print, scroll one page, print, scroll, print. It would take several minutes.
Worse, it did not recognize html formatted emails. I don't mean it couldn't display them properly, it just didn't recognize them - they were missing in action! IIRC, they didn't even show up in the subject line, maybe just the content was blank, but I actually think the entire email was non-existent, you didn't even know it was received. Even in the year 2000, a fair % of emails had html content.
Those two things were deal breakers. A shame, because it actually was a nice device in many ways.
Anyone know of a free dial up service I could use to test this out?
-ERD50