1. The hardware: Any Mac Classic, SE, and beyond really will work fine. In fact, I've read and heard of people with a Mac Plus online.
2. The Operating System: Personally, I have been able to get any Mac starting with System 7 online; however, I rather suspect that System 6 will also work IF you install the components listed below. However, all I can tell you is what I have read from other Mac users' web pages, in which they have given testimonials about using systems prior to System 7. From my experience, if you have System 7.x, you'll be fine.
3. An Internet Service Provider: For the purpose of this page, I'm assuming you have an account with jellico.com from Jellico, TN, like I do.
4. The connection software: There are a couple of very important pieces of software you have to have to begin the process, which work together to give you a pipeline to the world wide web. Here they are:

The "PPP" part of your internet connection allows your computer to directly exchange information to and from other internet sites (in a PPP internet setup, your computer actually becomes a part of the world wide web!). The Mac PPP utility that I use, and the one I definitely recommend, is FreePPP. The screen shots I have on this page are from FreePPP, and it is available for download from www.download.com.

TCP EXTENSION

Macs which are System 7 and later come with a utility called MacTCP. "TCP" and "IP" are internet protocols, or sets of rules for the way that points on a network work together. TCP is called a "transport" for "open" systems, which really means that it allows you to play by the sets of standard operating rules while moving data back and forth across a network. There is also a tool called "Open Transport" which later Macs take advantage of, but for my purpose of creating this web page, I'll deal only with MacTCP.

BROWSER

Once you have your connection with your Internet Service Provider, and once your computer is playing by the rules (PPP and TCP/IP stack), you need a way to turn this data stream into something you can use. That's where the browser comes in! For our Vintage Macs, something like Internet Explorer 2.0 is new enough to interpret most new web pages but still small enough to run fairly well on an older Mac. There are also browsers like MacWeb, Netscape Navigator, iCab, and so on. (ASIDE: If you have a really old Mac, or if you are just interested in TERMINAL EMULATION, please feel free to e-mail me and I'll be happy to help you TELNET to a public server where you can run Lynx, which is a text-only browser.)

TransMAC

IF you already have a PC that is online (if not, how are you viewing this page now?) then an extremely valuable program to have is TransMAC. This program runs on your PC and lets you read and write to Mac formatted disks. This way, you can download all the utilities I mentioned above on your PC and save them to Mac disks. Keep in mind that you need to have StuffIt Expander on your Mac in order to UnStuff the files before you can use them, and you also need to know how to specify the file type when TransMAC gets ready to download (for more on that, click here).

Don't stop now--let's go to the next page!