You don't have to use old clunky protocols to escape the commercial web. Just don't visit commercial websites designed by collectives using JS libraries. Disable JS by default and leave a site when nothing displays. There is plenty of good web buried under all the commercial crap. We don't have to abandon HTTP.
That said, eternal-september.org is a great way to get back into usenet.
What groups (besides the obvious specific tech focused ones) are worth going on? I'm able to get on via sdf.org but I never actually found any engaging discussion.
I've been posting intermittently to alt.cyberpunk, alt.startrek, and alt.irc for a handful of years. It's slow, maybe a post a week, but when things happen it's a place to talk. Gotta be the change you want to see.
Newsgroups got pretty crazy with some of the uuencoded files people would post. That’s definitely an improvement. For a while there were warez groups with massive files split across a lot of posts.
Telnet text based muds are one of my favorite things we used to have. You’d telnet to a host and play a text based game where you’re trying to make progress walking through a world solving puzzles.
> Newsgroups got pretty crazy with some of the uuencoded files people would post. That’s definitely an improvement. For a while there were warez groups with massive files split across a lot of posts.
I worked for a major Usenet provider for 20+ years.
The mechanisms for posting large binary files essentially created a separate application layer on top of the protocol. uuencode was replaced with yEnc, and the applications built in parity checking to handle the provider problems with missing articles. Article subjects were co-opted in semi-standard ways to allow applications to combine individual articles into files, but eventually, they just started posting files of unique message IDs (NZBs) to websites or specific groups, completely bypassing the need to even look at article lists. That ended up being a requirement anyway, because some groups got so big, readers could not realistically download lists of new articles anyway.
That is still the norm. Massive files are still split across 1000s of posts, and the most popular binary groups are now "dump" groups, where the only thing common about the posts is that they are binary files of some kind. What's crazy is that even though Usenet readership has declined, Usenet posting volumes have continued a very steady increase.
It's been years and I still angry about yEnc, lol.
It suffers from all the same problems that UUEncode did, and that MIME had already solved. Using magic words in the body text as delineators, splitting parts using the subject line, it's terrible.
I took a LISP class in graduate school in the late 1980s, and dialed up to their VAX on a 300 baud modem from my commodore 64. Ah 40 character lines crawling across the TV/monitor. It felt powerful!
This article reminds us that the web is fundamentally democratic and inclusive. The best use of the web, retro or modern, is when ordinary people share with each other in the open and on the same level.
It's the commercialism and hierarchicalism that ruins everything.
> This article reminds us that the web is fundamentally democratic and inclusive.
None of the protocols discussed in TFA have anything to do with the web. In my opinion, www was created with a strong server client model, and was not as "democratic" as some of the other protocols prevalent at that time.
writing is a craft. you need practice (which i'm really quite out of).
writing is a power. even though literacy seem down - you can use this to make your point. not just to convince people, but to spark discussions that allow us to try to chip away to get to the underlying truth of the matter.
face it - most of the authors on medium aren't really insightful or entertaining enough to get paid.
there is plenty of room in society for open mic nights
"Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—things like article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting."
Speaking of being tired of the modern web: I think HTTP/HTML are fine. However medium really sucks, can't everyone start hosting their webpages somewhere else? This is slow on my mobile (even with adblocker) and this "open in app" bar doesn't want to disappear even if it's bringing no value
It looks like they switched to invite-only this year.
A client of mine would like to start blogging, and I was hoping to recommend the write.as free tier. I'd be interested to hear what other alternatives folks here recommend, or a write.as invite link from a paid user if anyone has one to spare.
My experience seems to be a bit different, apparently. I see a lot of interesting content hosted there. HN is my only entry point to Medium, so for me that site ist just a blog hoster, like blogspot.com is. But I do dislike the latter somehow, as well as Wordpress.
For me Medium seems to be the only acceptable blogging platform, but neither do I use it myself as I don't blog, nor do I visit any non-tech/-science content on that site.
But I do use a very strict setting in uBlock Origin, so maybe that's causing the site "to behave". And I only visit it on the desktop.
"Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—things like article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting."
I'm sorry, but I think for this article that seemed relevant since the real article title starts with "tired of the modern web", then discuss the merits of the "old" web. I thought the article media was itself a good illustration of what was wrong with the "new" web.
I would make an important note on FTP: it’s not a secure protocol. The last time I cared about FTP, the recommendation was to move toward SFTP or FTPS for production/public environments for this reason.
No. This is completely wrong in two different ways
First: The parent was talking about FTPS, which is the FTP protocol spoken over TLS, similar to how HTTPS can be HTTP/1.1 spoken over TLS
Second: SFTP is not FTPS, and it also isn't FTP spoken over SSH. Instead. SFTP is a protocol specifically for SSH which, like FTP, is concerned with file transfers, but matches what its authors actually wanted from file transfers in the modern era, rather the concerns FTP had decades ago.
not sure I fully understand your comment, I said correct as my first statement agreeing with the parent and thus your explaination (ie FTPS is FTP over TLS)
at what point did I mention that FTPS is SFTP??
my comment regarding SFTP was in reference to the parents comment
>but I left FTP for ssh long ago and never looked back.
but you're correct that >SFTP is a protocol specifically for SSH
It is not only insecure, but not specific enough on several aspects of the protocol, leading to implementation problems. It also doesn't do any error correction beyond TCP.
When someone starts an article with a protocol which has been among the first to be forbidden/blocked/tracked-and-shutdown-at-source, when possible/firewalled on any organization network, for the last 10 years, then I don't know what'd be the incentive to read any further :-(
That's fine: it doesn't suit their needs. No protocol is meant to be all things to all people, and every organisation has its own security posture and its own environment.
I don't think any of that entails that FTP is somehow failing to fulfil its contract. Implementing transport encryption is not within its scope. It has to be run over a secure channel, which can easily be done with FTPS.
So, basically: (mostly) dead protocols. That is precisely why they don't need to change. Protocols that are used widely are those who have no option but to change in order to adapt to real world problems
Misleading title I think. I assumed these were protocols in wide use that did not require changing because they were so well designed. Instead, this is about old protocols that didn't change...because nobody uses them anymore.
That said, it is an interesting retro blast from the past. As someone who cut their teeth during the BBS and early days of the web, it always brings back nostalgia. Computers were just more fun back then IMO.
I maintain a usenet subscription because the file transfer and search mechanisms are incredibly relevant today. There is a yuge amount of data still pushed around on the usenet. Which is not-so-coincedentally related to media formats and sizes (yarr)
They left out BGP, one of my favorite routing protocols! There's still a bunch of ancient routing protocols out there. They work pretty well, so I guess you can't argue with success.
My long (long) term plan of my browser (https://wapps.app) is to bring us back to something similar to Gopher.
First I want to make browsing web apps feel as good as browsing an app. Then I want to make it better. To do that I want to 'translate' the HTML into a common structure and create UI that can be similar across websites and rendered in a clean, easy to navigate way. Not sure if that makes sense. Join our Discord if you want to chat more about it (https://join.wapps.app)
An echo of a narrow slice of time. For a while, you could /ctcp version a channel and ircII would outnumber mIRC 10:1 (then obviously, less as time went on) and mIRC didn't have any scripting capabilities at all (mIRC < 4, I think, maybe < 3) compared to pretty good scripting capabilities for ircII!
ircII scripting felt vaguely C inspired, and mIRC's scripting definitely felt foreign to the UNIX/IRC culture it got attached to. I never got seriously into scripting mIRC, and the mental model might have changed, but draft 1 of adding scripting into mIRC definitely had that Rasmus Lerdorf "I don't know how to make a language at all, I'm just making something work" feel, whereas ircII scripting felt vaguely coherent from a C-ish background.
Very old impressions, and mIRC scripting might've gotten good in later versions. The earliest versions of mIRC scripting definitely felt very weird.
That was a mightily insightful comment, and one I wasn’t expecting. Thanks for sharing your experience.
Side note: I found the Rasmus analogy particularly relatable. I’ve been building in PHP for a little over 20 years now, and despite all the hate it gets around these parts, I remain a fan.
Funnily enough, now probably biggest licensed, paying user of mirc is US DoD for use in C4 systems, with text messages on IRC handling things like arranging supporting fire...
Is it too late to create a version of the web that is just plain text (no markup)? After 25 years on the web, I'm starting to feel format fatigue so much that I actually cherish reading man pages and internet RFCs on the terminal (and even occasionally reading web pages on lynx).
> Is it too late to create a version of the web that is just plain text (no markup)?
Just do it and post a reference implementation of a server and a client (assuming this is the architecture that you want to use), and the protocol specifications somewhere.
This was done long ago. I forget the name, but there was a browser that only rendered the text parts. It was useful on slow modems or text-only screens.
An even more noteworthy protocol is MIDI[1], which has been virtually unchanged since its introduction in 1981, and is still the way that electronic musical instruments and software talk to each other.
MIDI-over-USB has been popular for a while, but we're seeing a resurgence of "classical" MIDI over serial with the current synthesizer renaissance.
And of course it's all the same on the software side.
I'm not sure this counts. Their similarity in name notwithstanding, MIDI 2.0 is explicitly a different protocol from MIDI 1.0. It's not meant to replace it, but to exist in parallel with it. Which is good because I suspect it's doomed. Anyway, MIDI 1.0 is still a standard protocol.
It will take some years. As of now no bigger DAW supports MIDI 2.0 AFAIK, which is also because almost no 2.0 devices exist (Roland's A 88 MKII is the only one I know of).
MIDI 2.0 is the IPv6 of synths. The installed base of original MIDI is huge and the advantages of 2.0 are not immediately obvious, unless you have very specific needs such as microtonality. It might take 10 years for 2.0 to reach critical mass, if all vendors adopt it _en masse_, but there is no reason for it to "fail" outright.
I can think of many reasons why MIDI 2.0 might be advantageous. But microtonality? Why? MIDI 1.0's MTS supports everything Scala can throw at it, doesn't it?
I used microtonality as an example. Yes, it can be done with MIDI 1.0 but it's a hack whereas with MIDI 2 it's built-in. Actually, you could probably emulate much of MIDI 2 functionality using MIDI 1 but it would just become a new protocol over an old one at some point.
2.0 is already supported by Logic and I suspect that Midi 2.0 support will be a good marketing item for midi controllers. So we’ll see but I think its prospects better than IPv6
Actually, this kind of a collective lie perpetrated in the synth community. MIDI's version number never changed from 1.0, but it has had numerous revisions, including LSB+MSB CC values, NRPN and RPN, General MIDI definitions, MIDI Show control, MIDI Machine control, MTC, MIDI file formats, etc. etc. And of course recently MPE. The original version was quite primitive.
I'm looking at the so-called "1.0 Specification" circa 1995, and it's document version 4.2.
170 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 234 ms ] threadhttps://github.com/michael-lazar/hn-gopher
That said, eternal-september.org is a great way to get back into usenet.
Here is a list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modem#Evolution_of_dial-up_spe...
Telnet text based muds are one of my favorite things we used to have. You’d telnet to a host and play a text based game where you’re trying to make progress walking through a world solving puzzles.
I worked for a major Usenet provider for 20+ years.
The mechanisms for posting large binary files essentially created a separate application layer on top of the protocol. uuencode was replaced with yEnc, and the applications built in parity checking to handle the provider problems with missing articles. Article subjects were co-opted in semi-standard ways to allow applications to combine individual articles into files, but eventually, they just started posting files of unique message IDs (NZBs) to websites or specific groups, completely bypassing the need to even look at article lists. That ended up being a requirement anyway, because some groups got so big, readers could not realistically download lists of new articles anyway.
That is still the norm. Massive files are still split across 1000s of posts, and the most popular binary groups are now "dump" groups, where the only thing common about the posts is that they are binary files of some kind. What's crazy is that even though Usenet readership has declined, Usenet posting volumes have continued a very steady increase.
It suffers from all the same problems that UUEncode did, and that MIME had already solved. Using magic words in the body text as delineators, splitting parts using the subject line, it's terrible.
As my username will attest to, 300 bps modems were very common in the 80s. I got my first one in 1985.
My first modem was 110. 300 was exciting, and 1200 was outrageous.
It's the commercialism and hierarchicalism that ruins everything.
None of the protocols discussed in TFA have anything to do with the web. In my opinion, www was created with a strong server client model, and was not as "democratic" as some of the other protocols prevalent at that time.
To authors everywhere: Stop writing on medium.
Good ole Google Ads on a WordPress blog seems fine historically.
At least substack loads fast…
writing is a power. even though literacy seem down - you can use this to make your point. not just to convince people, but to spark discussions that allow us to try to chip away to get to the underlying truth of the matter.
face it - most of the authors on medium aren't really insightful or entertaining enough to get paid.
there is plenty of room in society for open mic nights
Though I would not expect some piles of money unless you have an army of invested readers.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
A client of mine would like to start blogging, and I was hoping to recommend the write.as free tier. I'd be interested to hear what other alternatives folks here recommend, or a write.as invite link from a paid user if anyone has one to spare.
https://medium.com/interaction-reimagined/regular-expression...
https://scribe.rip/interaction-reimagined/regular-expression...
The only things we've really lost are MIDIs, <blink> / <marquee>, and Flash. And for some reason people don't like bedazzled mouse pointers anymore.
https://caniuse.com/?search=marquee
For me Medium seems to be the only acceptable blogging platform, but neither do I use it myself as I don't blog, nor do I visit any non-tech/-science content on that site.
But I do use a very strict setting in uBlock Origin, so maybe that's causing the site "to behave". And I only visit it on the desktop.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
First: The parent was talking about FTPS, which is the FTP protocol spoken over TLS, similar to how HTTPS can be HTTP/1.1 spoken over TLS
Second: SFTP is not FTPS, and it also isn't FTP spoken over SSH. Instead. SFTP is a protocol specifically for SSH which, like FTP, is concerned with file transfers, but matches what its authors actually wanted from file transfers in the modern era, rather the concerns FTP had decades ago.
at what point did I mention that FTPS is SFTP??
my comment regarding SFTP was in reference to the parents comment
>but I left FTP for ssh long ago and never looked back.
but you're correct that >SFTP is a protocol specifically for SSH
I had also understood your comment to mean that SFTP is "just FTP tunneled through SSH" (i.e. FTPS) rather than a redesigned protocol.
It is quite fast, however, compared to SFTP/SSH.
http://mywiki.wooledge.org/FtpMustDie
I don't think any of that entails that FTP is somehow failing to fulfil its contract. Implementing transport encryption is not within its scope. It has to be run over a secure channel, which can easily be done with FTPS.
It’s one of the best ways to get new files today and been around since 1988.
https://gemini.circumlunar.space/
It's still obviously very small, but Gemini space is growing.
The Gemini protocol is 13 months old.
That said, it is an interesting retro blast from the past. As someone who cut their teeth during the BBS and early days of the web, it always brings back nostalgia. Computers were just more fun back then IMO.
For instance, BGP can be used as an mac learning mechanism (EVPN), It can be used to communicate MPLS LSP's, it can even be used for source routing.
First I want to make browsing web apps feel as good as browsing an app. Then I want to make it better. To do that I want to 'translate' the HTML into a common structure and create UI that can be similar across websites and rendered in a clean, easy to navigate way. Not sure if that makes sense. Join our Discord if you want to chat more about it (https://join.wapps.app)
That, and reverse engineering GORILLA.BAS :-)
These days I use irssi, so am completely out of touch with mIRC.
Why the “Pfft”?
ircII scripting felt vaguely C inspired, and mIRC's scripting definitely felt foreign to the UNIX/IRC culture it got attached to. I never got seriously into scripting mIRC, and the mental model might have changed, but draft 1 of adding scripting into mIRC definitely had that Rasmus Lerdorf "I don't know how to make a language at all, I'm just making something work" feel, whereas ircII scripting felt vaguely coherent from a C-ish background.
Very old impressions, and mIRC scripting might've gotten good in later versions. The earliest versions of mIRC scripting definitely felt very weird.
Side note: I found the Rasmus analogy particularly relatable. I’ve been building in PHP for a little over 20 years now, and despite all the hate it gets around these parts, I remain a fan.
Just do it and post a reference implementation of a server and a client (assuming this is the architecture that you want to use), and the protocol specifications somewhere.
MIDI-over-USB has been popular for a while, but we're seeing a resurgence of "classical" MIDI over serial with the current synthesizer renaissance.
And of course it's all the same on the software side.
Note on:
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIDI
https://www.midi.org/specifications/midi-2-0-specifications
There are obviously a number of 2.0 features that are much more advanced than 1.0 (MIDI is primitive). But MTS is actually pretty good and not a hack.
I'm looking at the so-called "1.0 Specification" circa 1995, and it's document version 4.2.