[reaperducer]

Slightly related:

There was a time when web browsing was crazy slow and expensive, but there were e-mail services that were also crazy slow, but free.

There were mail to web gateways that you could e-mail a URL to, which would then reply with the contents of the web page. You'd then send another URL from that page, and get another reply, and so on. Free slow-motion web browsing.

I say "slow-motion" because this was back when getting a response to an e-mail took hours or days, not seconds. So you were lucky to get through three or four links in a day. But it was free, and we had other things to do than surf the web anyway.

[skissane]

RMS was still doing that this century

https://lwn.net/Articles/262570/

I wonder if he still is today

[Dutchie987]

There where even mail-to-ftp gateways. I vaguely remember using bitftp (?) to get a copy of the Utah Raster Toolkit that way. Long time ago...