before the internet computers were pretty much useless, except for things like visicalc and wordstar. Besides basic office duties they were useless in the home, except to geeks who didn't mind pecking out simple programs that were forgotten when the machine powered down (or often before!)
Then the models got speeds beyond 2400 baud and netcom and such sprang up and suddenly in the home computers did a little more. There was gopher and nntp and email and you could poke around in the shell accounts for hours of fun. Finally mosaic became nutscrape and the web exploded and suddenly everyone and everything had a "home page". Things looked touch and go for a while as AOL tried to ruin it, but they went poof with their time warner friends around the turn of the century and couldn't (like many companies, including excite) figure out if they were a media or tech company. Thankfully around that time windows was getting a proper tcpip stack and we didn't need to be nerds and figure out winsock settings anymore. Then, and not really until then, were computers viable for regular people at home (no excite pun intended.) there was games (ms flight sim for example) and proper word processing packages, even quark express for "DTP" and there was an embryonic web, bbs, the well, aol, yahoo, pointcast...
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before the internet computers were pretty much useless, except for things like visicalc and wordstar. Besides basic office duties they were useless in the home, except to geeks who didn't mind pecking out simple programs that were forgotten when the machine powered down (or often before!)
Then the models got speeds beyond 2400 baud and netcom and such sprang up and suddenly in the home computers did a little more. There was gopher and nntp and email and you could poke around in the shell accounts for hours of fun. Finally mosaic became nutscrape and the web exploded and suddenly everyone and everything had a "home page". Things looked touch and go for a while as AOL tried to ruin it, but they went poof with their time warner friends around the turn of the century and couldn't (like many companies, including excite) figure out if they were a media or tech company. Thankfully around that time windows was getting a proper tcpip stack and we didn't need to be nerds and figure out winsock settings anymore. Then, and not really until then, were computers viable for regular people at home (no excite pun intended.) there was games (ms flight sim for example) and proper word processing packages, even quark express for "DTP" and there was an embryonic web, bbs, the well, aol, yahoo, pointcast...