Just thinking, was their a premiere "dial-up" Internet provider for the NeXT platform? Like AOL had Mac and Windows software so we could do the whole "You Got Mail" thing in the early days. Could the NeXT connect to AOL back then? If not, was there an online experience like AOL for non Mac and Windows folks?
I think I used Genie in my old 90s Atari days. Then when I went Mac in mid 90s I did eWorld until they died (eWorld was sooo cool) and then AOL. When I sold the Quadra 800AV I then moved onto the real Internet using separate apps like Mosaic, etc.... on both Mac and PC in the early days of modern Internet.
Just wondered if an AOL even exists anymore for VINTAGE systems?
tj
Back in 1994-1996, I used NeXT on White hardware (80486, 20 MB RAM) to connect to my university's dial-up modem pool. From there, I had a script that logged me in to my UNIX shell account via telnet on one of the university's servers then started SLIP, and later PPP. Once SLIP or PPP was running, I had a fairly robust, but slow (2400 Baud) internet connection. I also could chat or play ASCII games with the other shell account users on the server, which were most of the students in engineering. So it was pretty cool at the time. If I wanted to download something big (>1MB), I would ftp it to my shell account, then next time I was in the computer center, I would copy it over to a floppy. I didn't use the web much back then, but I did a lot on USENET (before Spam became a problem), and I used Gopher, a predecessor to the www.
NeXT was such a small platform back then, I don't think any major providers officially supported NeXT. A lot of user groups and clubs had dial-up BBS's back then for NeXT. But I never tried to use those. I think it would have been possible to connect to most main stream providers (PPP, SLIP) with the right script, and the scripts aren't difficult to write.
I planned on building a better NeXT (Pentium 90, 64 MB RAM), after I graduated, but I lost interest because I had other priorities. I installed Windows95 on my 486 and gave it to my younger brother. I went without a computer for three years. So I didn't use NeXT again until it came out as Mac OS X in 2001.