anyone utilizing early Macs to access the internet?

Right. For a pre-Mac II (e.g. Mac Plus), even Appletalk network file sharing was an exercise in futility, let alone Ethernet. Until the Quadras came along, an Ethernet interface was not built-in. You had to buy a separate network card for you Mac II, and more likely than not, it used "thin ethernet" (coax) not 10-base-T. I did use some 10- base-T SCSI Ethernet adapters for non-expandable Mac laptops around 1975, but they were barely up-to-snuff. While I was in grad school, from 1997 through 1999, I used a Quadra 700 running IE for browsing the web. It seemed unbearably slow even then, and I think I switched to Netscape because its rendering engine was more efficient (IE often had to redraw the whole web page twice-- e.g. to figure out how big the images were, and on a 68040 that was a noticeable delay). Plus a lots of things have changed since then. I don't think I even needed a Flash plugins at the time. Not that you would even think of watching a YouTube video on a processor that slow. For email I used GNU emacs RMAIL running on my group's Unix server. I had to abandon it when MIME became the norm around 2000. Bottom line: For small values of "access the internet" the older Macs were serviceable. By modern standards, the old browsers are curiosities at best. But if you need to transfer some old files off your old Mac, the connectivity is there, and I have been grateful that FTP still works even today. --Tim