It said the cards would enable smaller Internet service providers to provide dial-in connections at a lower cost than those who use competing products.

The rising popularity of these freely available programs, with names like Keep Alive, Rascal, Stay Connected and Ponger, mean that thousands of dial-in connections are being commandeered and made unavailable to others.

The reason for restricting the options which can be saved originated in a usage of lynx which was more common in the mid-1990s, i.e., using lynx itself as a front-end application to the Internet accessed by dial-in connections.