evilrouters.net

stan schroeder’s article “richard stallman invents new way of browsing the web” on mashable directed me to this e-mail on the misc@openbsd.org list where stallman (allegedly) states:

for personal reasons, i do not browse the web from my computer. (i also have not net connection much of the time.) to look at page i send mail to a demon which runs wget and mails the page back to me. it is very efficient use of my time, but it is slow in real time.

this took me on a trip down memory lane. i can remember, 13 or 14 years ago, when i had to access the internet via long-distance phone calls (which didn’t please my parents a whole lot). juno came out with a service where they provided free e-mail to anyone (ad supported) and even had a 1-800 number you could use to avoid long-distance charges. the proprietary client would dial up, send any queued mail, downloading any received mail, and disconnect.

some of us discovered that it was possible to access the internet by e-mail. using juno’s free e-mail service, you could construct specially crafted e-mail messages and send them to certain “gateways” to do things like download web pages, perform archie searches, and even ftp files.

ahh, the good ol’ days. =)