The little brother may boast of speed surfing on his rocketing cutting edge Pentium, but the ultimate techie chic is riding the waves on a Classic Mac with a Telnet connection. Way kewl! Also way cheap. Classic Macs - those adorable little Apple Macs with the tiny screen set high in the case - now cost around about £150 maximum, with 14.4bps external modems about £20, second hand; hell, there's a new Zoom modem for £29 currently available by mail order from Dabs Direct in England.
An account with an Internet Service Provider (ISP) will cost you anything from £90 up, in theory, but in practice Ireland On-Line, for instance, offers five mailboxes on a business account, so you could get five people together and pay £40 a year each: just £1.30 a week per person.
Other ISPs don't tend to offer shell accounts through Telnet, so they need a higher-spec - and costlier - computer; but Club Internet (£90 for this year, or £36.30 a quarter; up to five extra e-mail addresses for a once-off payment of £20 each) is an Amiga specialist.
Its site at http://www.clubie.ie has a section on how to connect using an Amiga, and they're really helpful on the phone when you ring to ask about it. Telecom Internet is thinking about offering Telnet shell accounts.
Virtually every creaky old computer from the 1960s can be used for Internet access without graphics - e-mail, Internet Relay Chat (IRC), FTP (downloading software and other files), reading Usenet newsgroups and reading - but not seeing graphics on - the World Wide Web.
With a Classic and 4MB of RAM on Apple's free System 7 to 7.0.1, though, you can use great applications such as Eudora Lite for e-mail, Fetch for FTP and Ircle for IRC - all three programs are free; and you can browse slooowly, but with graphics, with the MacWeb browser. You can have full Internet access.
But even on a really, really low-spec Mac, JAG, who has a Web page on using Classics for the Web (and as Web servers!) at http://www.eden.com/ arena/jagshouse, offers a way to use e-mail and newsgroups with one meg of RAM and a floppy drive.
Connecting through a cheap computer isn't as easy as switching on a TV. It's not a whole lot more difficult than using Windows or the Mac operating system, though. I first heard about it when a friend in New York, playwright Jeremy Kareken, e-mailed in passing that he was using a Mac Classic II to send e-mail and chat on IRC. When I asked him how, he explained how he was dialling in to his ISP on a "shell" account, using MicroPhone, the software that had come with his modem.
"You use a modem connection program like MicroPhone or AppleTerm which sets up your computer as a `dumb terminal'," he said. "Computers as old as the hills [the 1960s] can act as dumb terminals, and so can the Mac Classic II. So can your PowerBook."
Veronica Walsh of Enterprise Computers in Marrowbone Lane, Dublin, kindly lent me her Colour Classic, and Garfield Conway, Ireland-On Line's top techie, showed me how to set it up with MicroPhone to dial in to IOL - the only ISP currently giving full Net access through Telnet. Garfield explained that to use a very basic Mac for shell access - this means using your computer to run software on the ISP's machine - you install MicroPhone and start it up, then go to Settings on the menu bar, then Communications, then set the Connection Port to Modem Port. Now set the speed to a comfortable speed such as 9,600; you may have to try a few speeds if it doesn't dial in at first.
Other dialler programs, like the DOS dialler Terminal, which you can use with that dusty old PC in the back room, work very much the same way, though the menu commands may be a little different.
Now click "Dial". A dialogue box comes up for you to type in the modem number. Type the Ireland On-Line number closest to you, and put two commas after the number - a trick to make the modem dial a little more slowly.
You'll get four prompts: (1) IOL login - you type "iol" (without quotes); then (2) login - you type the bit of your e-mail address that comes before the @ (mine is lucred@iol.ie, so I'd type "lucred"); then (3) Password (your password won't appear when you type it); then (4) an inquiry about Terminal Type - just hit the Return button.
Now you're in, and for everything after this you'll see instructions at the base of the screen. If you get scared or can't work things out, just press Q or control-Q until you're logged off and the phone hangs up. And if you're one of the first five to send me a photo of yourself using a Classic for Internet access, I'll send you a Secret Power Ring. Join the elite!
Lucille Redmond is at: lucred@iol.ie