[spauldo]

QMODEM didn't connect to the Internet. It had no IP stack.

It could connect you to a machine that had Internet access. Some ISPs offered that as a service (you'd get some kind of BBS-like interface or - if you were lucky - a UNIX shell), but that's not the same thing.

QMODEM was essentially just a terminal emulator that used a serial port and understood how to control a modem.

[grgbrn]

Indeed, I was there, I know. As a starving college student, using QModem for part of it.

> that's not the same thing.

I think your definition of "connect to the internet" make sense today, but would be ridiculously narrow when applied to the QModem era given the computing landscape at the time. Where do you draw the line? Using a tty style terminal connected via serial to a unix box connected via ethernet? How about SLIP/PPP?

I guess my problem with your definition is that you end up saying that a very large percentage of people who were online at the time were using the internet through computers that were not "connected to the internet".

Until the mid-90s the internet was predominantly text anyway, so it's not like you were missing out on a whole lot if you were "only" using a terminal.

[spauldo]

My definition of a computer being on the Internet is the computer has an IP stack that can route directly to other networks. In this scenario, the Linux box at the other end of the serial cable was on the Internet. The machine running QModem was not.

However, the user running QModem was on the Internet.

[yusina]

Exactly.

After all this discussion here my conclusion is that "connecting to the internet" is an ambiguous term.

It can mean "have IP connectivity, i.e., IP packets routed to and from the internet" in which case the described PC was not "connected to the internet with QMODEM". It didn't do anything IP.

It can mean "have a terminal that can interact with information from/to the internet" in which case the PC was indeed "connected to the internet with QMODEM".

To me, the second meaning is quite the stretch, but apparently to others it's fine.

[grgbrn]

Yes, I think it's a very ambigious term.

My problem with your definition is that it doesn't take into account the reality of connectivity at the time (at least in my experience of the early 90s) - not a whole lot of machines had IP stacks that were connected via ethernet/isdn/t1/etc and online all the time. Certainly you'd have to be pretty special to actually own one or have one at home. Connecting over some kind of tty or dialup was extremely common.

So using your definition, a sizeable percentage (possibly even a majority?) of people who were online and doing things on the internet during the QModem era were doing it through computers that were not "connected to the internet". Which seems obviously silly.