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In the old days we had Windows and wanted to install Netscape or download Linux we used anonymous ftp servers. Now Windows has a web browser installed that we c

• dexwiz 10y ago
  Gopher had a lot going for it over the early web. But its death knell was University of Minnesota wanting to charge a licensing fee for it.
• VLM 10y ago
  ftpmail. Now that is outdated. I vaguely remember around 1990 you'd send an email to some peculiar address and in more than an hour but less than a day, the service would execute the commands you gave it and return ... perhaps uuencoded files via email? Some encoding? Text just appeared as text. I think I got new phrack issues that way. Or some other zine. I also obtained some software this way. Some of it was even FOSS/legal. It was a way of working around various quota or security limitations. You'd get your file just as well as FTP, merely slowly. There were of course limitations on the ftp-mail service, you couldn't fetch an entire OS distro this way. Unbelievably, you can still do this today http://www.nws.noaa.gov/tg/ftpmail_using.php http://www.nws.noaa.gov/tg/ftpmail_using.php The docs on that page do bring back some memories. Obviously real ftpmail service didn't have a "open" line it was more like "open anonymous@simtel20.something.something.something.mil" thats what we did for a good time during the first Bush administration with our 2400 baud modems, LOL.