Surprisingly (again:), after about 30 years, some Usenet servers are still available, and it is also possible to install a client for Windows, OSX or Linux. Not only from a technical but also from a social perspective, this ability to talk with people who share the same interests, was actually helpful. Everybody was able to post the message, other group participants were able to read it and if wanted, respond. Groups could be completely different, from to. The system provided access to the public “talk groups”, group names were using the special hierarchy, for example, in the group “” everybody was able to discuss topics about the C programming language. The Usenet is another “ancient” service, which was popular in the “pre-internet” era of the previous century. To put it simply, Gopher was a sort of the “early web” protocol in a simple text-based form, optimized for the low-speed connections.Īctually, Gopher was active for not so long, it was introduced in 1991 and its popularity began to fall in 1994: In the RFC1436 protocol specification, we can see many terms which are still in use today - TCP/IP connection, client-server model, etc. And a so-called “Internet Gopher Protocol” was made. Though it was possible to download and browse files via the FTP, there was an obvious demand to have a special tool to search and read the data. GopherĪt the beginning of the 90s, more computers were able to be connected to the network. This may look stupid nowadays but about 30 years ago this was exactly the way how people were exchanging files in the pre-internet era. Well, inside the archive there were some Perl and text files, I have no idea what is it and if there is any chance if I need it: -rwxrwxAnnounce.txt -rwxrwxFilePost.txt -rwxrwxrwx 1 447 FilePostBottom.txt -rwxrwxrwx 1 35147 LICENSE -rwxrwxREADME.md -rwxrwxrwx 1 115994 README.pdf -rwxrwxbbs_announce.md -rwxrwxrwx 1 24780 bbs_announce.pdf -rwxrwxbbs_ -rwxrwxfile_announce.md In the 90s on most computers, there was no multitasking - only after closing the terminal program, I could check, what files did I get. By the way, these escape sequences are still supported today by modern computers- for example, Linux and Mac users can try to enter this command:įinally, after disconnecting from the BBS, I can check the files I have downloaded. Which was looking surprisingly, not bad - special formatting and so-called ANSI escape codes allowed to make a pretty complex UI. After the successful login, it was possible to read mail, download or upload files using the text interface. On the other side, the access often was completely free. Because many BBSes were located at home, their services were often available only at night, for example from 0 to 7 am - if you wanted to check your mail, download or upload files, you had to wake up early, something which looks weird today. The speed varied from 300 bits/s in the 80s to 56600 bits/s in the 90s, calls were often possible only in the local area, otherwise, the telephone bills could be too high. Obviously, as in the case of any other phone call, this connection could be occupied by only one user at a time, others were just getting a “busy” signal and had to wait until the line will be free again. I’ve searched in Google using the words “public FTP list”, and got a website which has a pretty large list of open FTP sites: The FTP can be used today, for example, for remote server maintenance, but surprisingly, public anonymous FTPs are also available. This document also has internal links to the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and the Telnet Protocol, which were described in the “ARPA-Internet protocol handbook” in 1985 (when most of the people did not hear the word “Internet” at all). Of course, this protocol was not something immutable, lot’s of improvements were made, the phrase “FTP has had a long evolution over the years” was written in the “RFC 959” document published in 1985. Actually, there was no Internet at that time, computers were connected to the ARPA (Advanced Research Projects Agency) network, and there was an obvious demand to have a protocol for files exchange. The FTP (File Transfer Protocol) is not only “old”, but “ancient”, compared to modern standards - the first specification was published as RFC 114 on 16 April 1971. People were browsing online pages this way about 30 years ago
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