I have an old 486/25 (maybe it's 33, I don't remember right now). Right now ISPs and websites set themselves up as if no one out there has a computer that's more than two years old, and most of the Internet software and accounts that you'll see available or advertised are for that market. However, there are still perfectly good ways to use a computer that is considered too obsolete. Until March 1999, my parents were running an Internet account from an old 286 with 1 mB of RAM. The links below are just a little information on software you might be able to run with an older computer.

Shell accounts. When I first got online, this was what was normal. They're still around, but not many people use them anymore. I'm not sure why not, they're much faster than any graphical access and usually cheaper as well. And if you have a modem, you can probably have a shell account.

If you read the newspapers or browse the web now, you could be forgiven for believing that there are only two browsers, and that if you have an old computer you either can't browse at all or can do so only slowly and with very poor graphics. That would be wrong. There are at least three good workable browsers other than Netscape and Explorer. All three are much smaller, and two of them would work perfectly well on the oldest computer I've used (that 286).

Lynx. I'm probably cheating by putting lynx in here, because usually if you run lynx it's through a shell account and you never really run it on your own computer. There are versions available that you can run from your computer, instead of through a shell account, and I think you can even get it for Windows now. It's still my favorite and it's faster than anything else you can get. It's basically text-only, although there are ways to download and view graphics if you really want to.

Arachne. This is a DOS based graphical browser. It's slow and navigating with it can be frustrating, but it's pretty stable (I've only had it crash twice so far) and the graphics quality is very good. It's freeware, too, and has its own dialer and some kind of email capability that I've not tried.

Opera. This you have to pay for. It's faster than Explorer or Netscape, but on my computer it crashes easily and the graphics aren't very good. Still, while it runs it works better than either of the two more common browsers.