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Tired of the Modern Web? Discover some ‘Retro’ protocols you still can use
today

Dmitrii Eliuseev
[9]Dmitrii Eliuseev
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[12]Jan 15 · 10 min read
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Are you tired of heavy web pages, browser pop-ups, flashing banners,
N-factor authentication, user tracking and analytics? Well, there are
some protocols that have not changed in the last 30 years and you can
still try using them.
People were browsing online pages this way about 30 years ago

Let’s get started.

FTP

The FTP (File Transfer Protocol) is not only “old”, but “ancient”,
compared to modern standards — the first specification was published as
[13]RFC 114 on 16 April 1971. Actually, there was no Internet at that
time, computers were connected to the [14]ARPA (Advanced Research
Projects Agency) network, and there was an obvious demand to have a
protocol for files exchange. 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. 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).

The FTP can be used today, for example, for remote server maintenance,
but surprisingly, public anonymous FTPs are also available. I’ve
searched in Google using the words “public FTP list”, and got a website
[15]https://www.mmnt.net which has a pretty large list of open FTP
sites:

Readers who wish to get a feeling of how it was working many years ago,
can try to log in to the FTP using the command line. I tried the first
link, and it really works:

Of course, it would be much easier to use any modern FTP client,
something like [16]FAR Manager or [17]Midnight Commander will be even
more “in line” with that era and will also give an idea of how the
old-school text UI was used:

Princeton‘s’ FTP is obviously intended for students, I was able to
download some files from the “University Press” which can also be
interesting to read:

The same book can obviously be obtained in a ‘modern’ way [18]using a
website but browsing the file listing using a text UI can be a good
demonstration of how people were getting these files many years ago.

BBS

Already in the 70s scientists and engineers in ARPA already had a
possibility to be online, but this was still not possible for ordinary
computer users. For millions of them, Bulletin Board Systems were the
first rudimentary way to connect the home computer to other machines
and to exchange files and messages. Why ‘rudimentary’? Often the BBS
was just an ordinary computer, connected to a home telephone line. And
by the way, first modems were literally using the acoustic coupling
with a standard phone handset:
Image source © [19]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acoustic_coupler

Obviously, like with a standard 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. The
connection speed varied from 1200 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. After the successful login, it
was possible to read mail, download or upload files using the text
interface. Which was looking surprisingly, not bad — special formatting
and so-called [20]ANSI escape codes allowed to make a pretty complex
UI. 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:

Later providing access to the BBS became a larger business, where
different services were provided, from software archives to the ‘adult’
content.
Source © PC Magazine 1993

And it is interesting to know that some BBS are still operating today.
Of course, it is not a business anymore, they are supported by
enthusiasts. Originally, home computers mostly used a telephone line
for the modem connection, now it is much easier — using the IP
connection it is possible to access the BBS from any part of the world.

Technically, any telnet client can connect to the modern BBS, but in my
opinion, the free and open-source [21]SyncTerm looks the best — its
text-based UI provides the most ‘authentic’ user interface. As in the
90s, before dialing the BBS, we have to find the latest [22]BBS List,
which is now available online. I randomly selected the “Amiga City
BBS”, no modem is needed, I only need to enter the syncterm
amigacity.xyz command:

As we can see, the BBS provides the text interface to read the
messages, list files, I even can have access to the “Electronic Mail” —
a sort of high-tech in the 90s:

Let’s check the files section:

I can download some files, which are available online, I chose the
ZMODEM protocol to download the file:

The download can take some time — now its obviously faster but on the
real modems, the speed was about 1–3 Kilobytes per second (for people
who were born in 2000 and later, I’ll repeat — Kilo and not
Megabytes;), sometimes downloading of the software or a game could take
several hours.

I can also upload my own files to the BBS — I’ve decided to upload the
copy of my [23]Medium article:

Finally, after disconnecting from the BBS, I can check the files I have
downloaded. In the 90s on most computers, there was no multitasking —
only after closing the terminal program, I could check, what files did
I get. 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:
-rwxrwxrwx 1 1893 Feb 4 2018 Announce.txt
-rwxrwxrwx 1 1521 Feb 4 2018 FilePost.txt
-rwxrwxrwx 1 447 Feb 4 2018 FilePostBottom.txt
-rwxrwxrwx 1 35147 Feb 4 2018 LICENSE
-rwxrwxrwx 1 1786 Feb 4 2018 README.md
-rwxrwxrwx 1 115994 Feb 4 2018 README.pdf
-rwxrwxrwx 1 1143 Feb 4 2018 bbs_announce.md
-rwxrwxrwx 1 24780 Feb 4 2018 bbs_announce.pdf
-rwxrwxrwx 1 1572 Feb 4 2018 bbs_announce.pl
-rwxrwxrwx 1 1096 Feb 4 2018 file_announce.md

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.

Gopher

At the beginning of the 90s, more computers were able to be connected
to the network. 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. And a so-called “Internet Gopher Protocol” was made.
In the [24]RFC1436 protocol specification, we can see many terms which
are still in use today — TCP/IP connection, client-server model, etc.
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.

Actually, Gopher was active for now so long, it was introduced in 1991
and its popularity began to fall in 1994:
Source © [25]https://ils.unc.edu/callee/gopherpaper.htm

There were not only technical but also legal issues — the Gopher server
license was not free (it was re-licensed under the GNU License only in
2000). But computers also became more powerful and people chose more
“fancy” WWW pages instead of plain text ones. Interestingly, Internet
Explorer in Windows 95 was able to open Gopher links:

But already in Windows XP, this feature is not present anymore:

But again, some Gopher servers are still supported by enthusiasts
nowadays, the free client can be downloaded from the
[26]https://github.com/jankammerath/gophie/releases page.

As an example, we can open the gopher://gopherddit.com:70 page which
provides access to the Reddit groups:

Using the gopher://gopherpedia.com:70 address, we can read the
Wikipedia:

Newsgroups

The Usenet is another “ancient” service, which was popular in the
“pre-internet” era of the previous century. The system provided access
to the public “talk groups”, group names were using the special
hierarchy, for example, in the group “comp.lang.c” everybody was able
to discuss topics about the C programming language. Groups could be
completely different, from talk.politics.animal to misc.kids.pregnancy.
Everybody was able to post the message, other group participants were
able to read it and if wanted, respond. 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.

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. But most of the servers, I was able to find, are
not free, they provide only 7 or 14 days free trial period. On the
other side, many talk groups are available via the
[27]https://groups.google.com interface, and as we can see, the same
“comp.lang.c” group still have some new messages even today:

Of course, about 20 messages within two weeks — it is way less than,
for example, on Reddit, but, it still works.

By the way, in the talk groups it was even possible to exchange files.
Using the special encoding, the files could be converted to the text
form and could be sent like an ordinary mail message. The size of each
message was obviously limited, so the file should be split into several
parts. As an example, I encoded the JPEG file into 3 messages:

Message #1
To medium.readers.all, share part 1/3begin 664 xaa
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M'AX>'AX>'AX>'AX>'AX>'AX>'AX>'A[_P``1"`"``(`#`2(``A$!`Q$!_\0`
M'P```04!`0$!`0$```````````$"`P0%!@<("0H+_\0`M1```@$#`P($`P4%
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7J49T/C/-J4Z;UN7]0A&MQ*C)L9&!CFT`
`
end

Message #2
To medium.readers.all, share part 2/3begin 664 xab
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`
end

Message #3
To medium.readers.all, share part 3/3Dear all, look at this JPG it's nice.begin
664 xac
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4F&(8P/6O1HT8TTHK9#J57*R1_]D`
`
end

Decoding of this picture readers can do on their own, it will get an
idea of how the file-sharing was working many years ago when services
like Dropbox or Google Drive were not invented yet.

Conclusion

It was interesting to test how these protocols work, not only for
nostalgic reasons (I was using BBS and Usenet myself in the 90s) but
also from a technical perspective. Some ideas, which were invented many
years ago, with some changes still can be used today, and knowing the
background allows us to understand them better. It is also interesting
to mention that even in the “pre-internet” era people were able to be
online, participate in public talk groups, exchange files, and so on.
Old Web was much smaller, much less secure, but it was a much more
closed community of engineers, scientists and IT-professionals, and a
“trust credit” to every other user was probably much higher than today.
But this is maybe a topic for another story.

Thanks for reading. Those who are interested are also welcome to read
other articles about the computer's history:
* [43]Windows 95
* [44]Windows 1.0, 2.0, 3.0
* [45]MS-DOS
* [46]Apple Macintosh
* [47]CP/M

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* [50]Technology
* [51]Computers
* [52]Retro
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Dmitrii Eliuseev

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