Alan Bostick says:
SLIP connections, quality Web browsers, and MIME-compliant email packages are the high end of Net access today.
Hardly. I was at a party last friday night where the host had a T1 into his home, and numerous workstations on the home network. That counts as "high end", I'd say. Running a router, firewall and a network of workstations does indeed require skill. However...
They demand either an investment of money (intelligently spent) or an investment of effort to get the stuff up and running and to get the know-how needed to do so.
Given that you can get a SLIP account just as easily as a shell account (i.e. call a provider) and that terminal software is not notably simpler to configure than SLIP or PPP software (anyone who thinks otherwise should try explaining what "seven bits, even parity" or "vt100 emulation" means to a liberal arts major) I'd say that the arguments being made are specious. They are based on the conjectures of people who haven't tried, rather than on the experience of those who have. With a package like "Chameleon", getting a PPP connection going is a matter of typing in a phone number and a couple of other magic values to a pretty friendly on-screen form -- which is more or less the level of effort needed to get a terminal emulator up and running. It might be different effort -- and certain people like Tim who are set in their ways might think of the tiny difference as a huge barrier -- but its not a particularly large effort. As for the money, these programs are not notably more expensive than commercial terminal emulators. I'd say, in fact, that running via SLIP or PPP is a SMALLER investment in time and effort because for the naive user running native applications on their machine with the native help and windowing systems running is probably a much more comfortable situation than trying to run "elm" via a weird terminal emulator program. And yes, I've some experience at what the naive users are like. There are now boxes you can get from your local bookstore that contain everything you need -- software, online signup, etc -- to get a PPP or SLIP connection to the net. I'd say that the kvetching is all just plain wrong. Perry