[mark_round]

There is also Spectranet[1] and clones for the Sinclair Spectrum, which allows for a much richer Internet-connected experience. It can load and boot remote programs from a server which allows you to get quite creative and produce sites like my TNFS server[2]. You can also try it out from an emulated Spectrum in a web browser at https://jsspeccy.markround.com if you don't have the original hardware lying around to see the sort of stuff you can build!

There's also Telnet clients so you can access old-school BBSes, and a variety of interesting "bridges" that grant access to Gopher or even parse websites. Quite amazing to access the modern Internet on an 8-bit machine from the early 80s that originally loaded games from cassette tape :)

[1]=https://www.bytedelight.com/?page_id=3515

[2]=https://tnfs.markround.com

[anthk]

Once you have telnet you just get an SDF account and do anything you want with a Unix shell. And, if you fire up Emacs, you are god. IRC, EMail, Jabber, Mastodon, gopher, gemini, a calculator, a Lisp environment, play ZMachine games with Malyon (and spawn full v5 and v8 games unlike the Speccy which could just handle v3 ones)...