The IIfx was (is?) a very capable web-browsing machine. Considering
the initial cost of that unit, it seems silly to grade it in these
terms...but I was using a IIfx up until 1999 or so for web/ftp/email
and it was rock-solid.
Aaron
On Sep 30, 2008, at 8:53 PM, Tim McNerney wrote:
I've been
told using the compact Macs are an exercise in futility.
But what about the Mac II's? (original II, IIx, IIfx, IIcx).
I was just curious.
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
--
Aaron C Finney
Technical Services Manager
WFI Incorporated
626-857-5599 x314
afinney at