Years and years ago I started using Delphi internet services. They had a complicated dialup arrangement through Sprintnet and Tymenet to a farm of VAX servers in the Boston area, part of Northeast Education and Research (NEAR) net. This was Delphi internet, character-mode, 9600 baud. I used Mac classic and an external modem. It was primitive, but effective.

Back in '96 or thereabouts, Delphi closed down their dial-up service, and switched their customers to Mindspring. I continued to use a Delphi.com email address until they stopped that service also. When Delphi folded up shop entirely (in 98?), I switched to using yahoo.com as my mail address, using Mindspring for dialup and for web page hosting. Mindspring was bought by Earthlink, but this didn't change my access.

Since starting to use Road Runner back in '00 or '01, I've kept both a dial-up Mindspring account and a road-runner account. Basically I could keep my Mindspring web site for under $60 per year, even though I didn't make much use of their dial-up service.

Now that I'm paying for a .mac site, it's hard to justify keeping the Mindspring site running. So, I've restructured my site slightly, moved it to .mac. The final step is to replace the old site with a much of meta tags that redirect back to the .mac site.