CDR: Re: Mac created the modern Internet

Bill Stewart bill.stewart at pobox.com
Fri Oct 20 02:31:05 PDT 2000


At 01:40 PM 10/19/00 -0400, Tim May wrote:
>By the way, on a historical note, I was a Netcom customer when Netcom 
>began offering their own proprietary Web browser solution. I don't 
>even recall what they called it. It only ran under Windows, so we Mac 
>users had to look elsewhere for our ISPs.

NetComplete - it had a browser, email, and a few other capabilities. 
You didn't have to use it; I tried it briefly and decided it was
seriously lame but easy to ignore.  The main effect it had on
service was that you were more likely to get questions answered
if you were using their wares than random other things,
but that was around the time that calling Netcom technical support
meant 45 minutes on hold to get some clueless newbie operator-trainee.

>(More's the pity for Netcom, as the general TIA/SLIP/PPP tools were 
>available to let Mac users like me use Mosaic and other browsers. But 
>Netcom hoped to become a browser company, I suppose. They later got 
>absorbed into Mindspring, I think.)

ICG ate Netcom, Mindspring ate ICG, and ate or merged with Earthlink.
I've still got my all-you-can-eat dialup account; 
works fine, has good nationwide coverage,
and has an 800 number that's useful from some hotels.
They do periodically send mail saying "hey, be nice, you're in 
the top 3% of connect time", but that's the reason for buying
full-time dialup service; if they change their pricing I'll
change my connection habits.  Also, some setup things are a bit different
between Mindspring POPs and Netcom POPs.

I should dump them for AT&T of course (:-), and I may do that
when I get cable modem installed, but AT&T only gives you
something like 100 hours before charging per hour.
				Thanks! 
					Bill
Bill Stewart, bill.stewart at pobox.com
PGP Fingerprint D454 E202 CBC8 40BF  3C85 B884 0ABE 4639






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