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Yes, I think it's a very ambigious term.

My problem with your definition is that it doesn't take into account the reality of connectivity at the time (at least in my experience of the early 90s) - not a whole lot of machines had IP stacks that were connected via ethernet/isdn/t1/etc and online all the time. Certainly you'd have to be pretty special to actually own one or have one at home. Connecting over some kind of tty or dialup was extremely common.

So using your definition, a sizeable percentage (possibly even a majority?) of people who were online and doing things on the internet during the QModem era were doing it through computers that were not "connected to the internet". Which seems obviously silly.



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