Simon Rumble gopher server

	Simon Rumble gopher server

	You kids wouldn't know what day of the week it was! Back
	in my day, we used to have to send a self-addressed envelope
	to a remote server, then wait a couple weeks for a response.
	Gee I tell you the TCP start up delays were a bitch. And it
	wasn't any of this new-fangled web shit either.

	State of the fucking art back in those steam-powered
	intertubes days was gopher, telnet and ftp. If we could
	find it on a local archie server, run by some bolshie
	academic pinhead, it'd still take a week to download. Then
	you'd probably have to compile it and find it was written
	for some expensive fucking academic hardware and you'd
	have to start again.

	Now if you wanted to talk to someone on the other side of
	the world, you'd use something like irc or a mud. Remember
	muds? You'd type something and about 30 seconds later
	your character would be echoed back. You see back then,
	Australia's connection to the intertubes was poor old
	Robert Elz out in the courtyard at Melbourne University
	with a giant fire, kept constantly stoked by unfortunate
	PhD students. Those poor kids would have to keep that
	fire burning hot and smoky, kre Elz could create packets
	out of smoke signals. Some poor grad student over in
	Hawaii would try and interpret the smoke signals and send
	them on to the real intertubes. As you can imagine,
	errors and retransmission were pretty common. The latency
	was fucking insane. You'd find the conversation in the
	irc channel had moved on by the time you saw your own
	message echoed back.

	So don't start fucken moaning about "only" getting
	six fucking megabits per fucking second. Luxury I tell
	yer!

	But we woz happy.