[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.