The prototype I evaluated at NeXT was supposed to work with any modem (remember Hayes compatibility?) and didn&#x27;t need PPP, since we had arranged a proprietary handshake with the organization that gave out IP addresses (I&#x27;ve forgotten the name. At the time I believe there was just one entity allowed to give out IP addresses.) We discussed requiring a specific modem - but decided that we didn&#x27;t want that to be a requirement for getting an IP address.<p>Ultimately, it came down to &quot;unsupportability&quot; by NeXT. Several people other than me told Steve that things would go wrong connecting to the Internet, and when they did we would be mostly helpless to support them. At the same time, the organization in Virginia didn&#x27;t want to support the software either - the software was a &quot;black box&quot; mostly provided by us on their machines. So we killed the project. I never heard anybody mention browsers.