[Techtalk] windoze-only ISPs?

[Travis Casey]

On Jan 21, 2006, at 5:31 PM, Carla Schroder wrote:

> Has anyone heard of, or had dealings with, an ISP that connects  
> only to
> Windows customers? Most of them don't support Linux, but you can  
> still get
> online, you just don't get any help from the ISP. I'm wondering if  
> there are
> any that can't even connect except with Windows.
>
> thankee kindly!

There used to be some, but I haven't heard of any such since IP took  
over the networking world and PPP the dial-up world.  But before  
that, there were ones that used their own software to communicate  
over the dial-up connection, in order to give something more than the  
plain-text BBS-type experience.  Prodigy and AOL both used to be of  
that sort.

I'm not sure if AOL has entirely abandoned their proprietary protocol  
for IP yet... if I remember right, back in '96 or so they still  
hadn't moved over to IP, but I would think they would have by now...

Doing some quick Googling, it appears that as recently as 2002, AOL  
was still using a proprietary protocol on their dial-up connections.   
There've been efforts to make free software to "speak" AOL's  
protocols, but AOL has sued people trying to do it.

AOL itself was never "Windows only", of course -- they supported GEOS  
before Windows, and still support Macs.  I'm not sure if Prodigy was  
or not.

--
Travis S. Casey           efindel at earthlink.net
I am an evil kitten!  Mew-ha-ha!