[reaperducer]

Base64 is such a wonderful gift.

Back when the commercial internet was just getting its act together there were companies that would give you free online access on Windows 3.1 machines in exchange for displaying ads in the e-mail client. (I think one was called Juno.)

The hitch was that you could only use e-mail. No web surfing. No downloading files. No fun stuff.

But that's OK, since there were usenet- and FTP-to-email gateways that you could ping and would happily return lists of files and messages. And if you sent another mail would happily send you base64-encoded versions of those binaries that you could decode on your machine.

The free e-mail service became slow-motion file sharing. But that was OK because you'd set it up before you went to bed and it would run overnight.

Thank you, whomever came up with base64.

[romanhn]

That reminds me of the first time I accessed World Wide Web. Back in '96 I was browsing a computer magazine and happened upon a listing of useful mailing lists, one of which returned the contents of web pages for a requested HTTP address. Same magazine had an install CD for the free Juno email service.

Being a teenager, the first web page I ever requested was www.doom.com, which returned a gibberish of text to Juno's email client. It was an HTML file full of IMG tags (one of those "Click here to enter" gateway pages), but I had no idea what I was looking at at the time. Somehow figured out to open the file in IE2 and saw... a bunch of broken images :)

I still vividly remember the sense of wonder that the early Internet evoked.

EDIT: Just checked the Wayback Machine. Looks like www.doom.com was not affiliated with the game at the time, so I must have browsed to www.idsoftware.com instead.

[xamuel]

It's really sad thinking how kids these days totally miss the wonder of the early internet.

In my case, it was at the public library. The lone internet computer was constantly booked. But by watching over a library clerk's shoulder, I was able to see the password needed to unlock the text-based library catalog terminals (which terminals were plentiful and always available). (My parents worked at the library, or else I never could have pulled that off.) Once unlocked, I was able to use Lynx to telnet into my favorite MUD game. Unfortunately it didn't last long until a librarian caught me, which I think resulted in me being grounded from the library for a month or something like that.

[300bps]

It's really sad thinking how kids these days totally miss the wonder of the early internet.

And before that, the wonder of bulletin board systems. I got my first modem in 1985!

[xamuel]

Username checks out ;)

[hcs]

I used Agora [1] with Juno, too! There was a particular daemon hosted in Japan, not sure how I found it but probably in a magazine.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agora_(web_browser)

[SergeAx]

Long before base64 there was UUencode, but it was quite sensitive to whitespaces and mail client reflowing, so it didn't make it to the RFC standards.

[simonh]

Yep and the Shar command that created a bash wrapper round sections of uuencoded data, so you could email a file in segments and conveniently recompose and run it to get the file back, without needing Shar at the other end. Good times.

[derriz]

That brings back memories. Of using an email gateway to get an Amiga fred fish disk - delivered as shar pieces to my uni email account (only staff had telnet, ftp, etc. access). Then assembling the pieces in /tmp on the departmental unix server. Then switching to a PC to use Kermit to get the contents onto a PC floppy. Then using an Amiga utility to be able to read PC format disks to copy them to an Amiga floppy.

I've no memeory of what motivated me to spend so much time just to be able to view some low-res, low-fps 3 second video clip, listen to 8-bit tracker "tunes" and try out some free application that invariably crashed the machine after a minute or two of use.

[phs318u]

> I've no memeory of what motivated me to spend so much time ...

I do :)

It was the wonder of doing something for the first time. Of feeling like you were pioneering and learning and having fun all at the same time.

Truly, fun times :)

[ohyeshedid]

That's really slick.

The original Juno ad server proxied the ads from the internet to the email client, and the proxy was wide open for several months. The first time I ever accessed the open internet at home was by dialing into the email service and bouncing through the proxy. I believe it was closed due to it being shared in the letters section of a hacker zine.

[groby_b]

Mary Ann Horton[1] is probably one of the people you want to thank. She's responsible for uuencode.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Ann_Horton

[gjtorikian]

Yep, Juno, NetZero, and Walmart BlueLight were all free ISPs that were super easy to manipulate. :)

[mmaunder]

Reminds me of usenet warez groups filled with uuencoded posts. If you took the time to reassemble them and decode, it worked.

[jabl]

First time I was able to access the WWW via a graphical browser I had a dial-in shell account at an ISP (or BBS or whatever they called themselves back then), then there was a program called "slirp" (which, amazingly enough, seems to have a wiki page at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slirp ) which allowed one to run "SLIP" (IP-over-serial) over the terminal connection to get IP access from my computer. Amazingly I got it to work, considering I barely knew what I was doing back then.

One big reason why I became a Linux user was that the TCP/IP stack for Win 3.1, Trumpet Winsock, was amazingly unstable and would regularly crash the entire OS. Linux had, even back then, a stable TCP/IP stack. And fantastic advancements like preemptive multitasking running in protected mode so errant user-space applications didn't crash the OS.

Good times.