In the old days, we had decent clients for http but they were all manual operated GUIs, and the decent clients for FTP were all CLI and/or extremely automatable

In the old days, we had decent clients for http but they were all manual operated GUIs, and the decent clients for FTP were all CLI and/or extremely automatable. Also in the old days it was unusual to have a machine with a GUI maybe 30 years ago. Also there was a day before dependency resolving automatic downloading GPG verifying distribution clients. I was there... Say you needed to roll back (or security upgrade) some software, you'd quite possibly go to a FTP site thats trusted, download some tar.gz or tar.z or shar archive that was trusted, make, make install, plus or minus some configuration of course. You can't do that via http in 1990 while telnet'd into a server, the http infrastructure and commands and servers hadn't been invented yet. Its also important to point out that at least some of us were fooling around with unix and FTP (and FTP to non-unix OS, I vaguely remember some TOPS20 server in the late 80s early 90s... simtel20?) before http ever existed. So naturally there were a lot of tools and processes and experience getting things done with FTP when HTTP arrived. Decent FTP client CLIs were extremely advanced. Not exactly "wget someurl" and hope for the best LOL. Automatic login with differing accounts per site, text mode graphs and stats as downloads commence, tab completion, local help command functionality, multi-connection support... Mirrored and often lead the developments in modem/BBS download functionality (think like Zmodem on Telix not kermit) Its sort of like those "how could you have thought using telnet was a good idea compared to ssh?" Well, I had 15 years of unix experience before OpenSSH was deployable, so we had a lot of telnet experience...