[7bit]

> Most of the "old internet" protocols (email, FTP, even HTTP itself) were bootstrapped on top of built-mostly-for-plaintext Telnet.

That's just not true. Telnet and SMTP are built on top of TCP. They live on the same layer. They were originally both protocols that transmitted data with printable ascii, hence why they look similar. There are many other protocols like Telnet and SMTP that worked like that, auch as nntp, irc, and yes, even http.

[20after4]

I think that the point is this: You could literally use a telnet client to talk to all of those servers and it was considered a good thing, maybe even an essential feature. So protocol design was somehow influenced by the need to be fully plain text ASCII streams (and maybe that other options weren't adequately explored due to this restriction)

[7bit]

Yeah, I got the point. His statements are still factually incorrect and needed correction.

[dhosek]

You can also telnet into port 80 and communicate with an HTTP server.

[WorldMaker]

Unless it is HTTP/3.

[gsich]

or 2.

[lxgr]

Or requires HTTPS, for that matter. (But then you can s_client into it :)

[dhosek]

Admittedly, it’s been decades since I tried this and I was deliberate about saying http and not https.