Web4 will be fought with telnet to port 80
You mean I've been buying all these tin cans with string between them for nothing??? Damn it…
@davidgerard oh good, so we can go back to Gopher?
@acsawdey @davidgerard Please an entire Gopher based info sharing platform would be great.
@acsawdey @davidgerard If you still want "social media" then bring back Usenet and BBS.

@Epic_Null @acsawdey @davidgerard

In the event that you are not trolling my advanced age, BBS = bulletin board system, traditionally accessed through a dial up modem.

Height of popularity 1980s - 1990s. About the same time as Gopher usage. BBSes were much more popular than Gopher, AFAIK.

@Walker @Epic_Null @davidgerard To be fair, gopher was doing fine until some guy at CERN wrote a paper and then some other guys at NCSA hacked together something called "Mosaic" .. BBSs I associate with direct dialup but gopher is an "early internet" thing.
@acsawdey @Walker @Epic_Null @davidgerard
Yes, BBS pre-dates the IBM PC. Certainly late 1970s. Gopher created in 1991 and though web sites date from about 1992 (Mosaic late 1993?), The HTML initial draft was about 1989. Hyperlink concept in 1960s and local software using hyperlinks (Hypercard, FutureNet) by mid 1980s.
So Gopher was doomed.
We had internet email via X25 pad to a server in 1986 and web from 1994 (Mosaic & 28K dialup). Netscape and 128K ISDN by 1998. I've never used Gopher.

@raymaccarthy @Walker @Epic_Null @davidgerard Oh for sure before IBM PC ... this is the path I'm familiar, I used XMODEM on CP/M machines both to transfer files over a null modem cable and over phone lines.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CBBS

CBBS - Wikipedia

@Walker @acsawdey @davidgerard

There's no lack of infrastructure, there at least hundreds of BBS's still running, nntp/usenet it trivial to set up, it's mostly used for bulk piracy tho, like you can move terabytes of pirated media on usenet

@Walker @acsawdey @davidgerard I'm working on getting off TCP/IP entirely.
@acsawdey @davidgerard Compile bombadillo, written in go, and ignition: https://bombadillo.colorfield.space/
Home: A smallnet client

Bombadillo: a non-web browser

Bombadillo
@davidgerard I'm already on web 5. It's a LAN covering 6 computers in some guy's house, and he's serving wikipedia off of a cd-rom, along with some other reference material, using one of those multi-cd bays that libraries used in the 90s. It's much more advanced than the current web, because there's no Linkedin.

@malvarma @davidgerard
It's certainly possible to serve an entire copy of Wikipedia and Gutenberg off a 15 year old PC.

However my experiments at 300 baud on Wireless 20 years ago suggested that at that speed only NTTP, POP3 & SMTP with plain text worked sanely. The overhead for HTML, never mind HTTP, is too high. SFTP/SSH depends only what it is. A pigeon with a mircoSD card can be better. Or sneaker-net with microSd, USB sticks / USB HDD instead of 1980s floppies for large file transfer.

@davidgerard I mean stuff like ssh terminal.shop is a move in that direction

@davidgerard

Wasn’t Gopher on Port 70?

@Saupreiss @davidgerard

We're going all the way back to RTTY on 14.080–14.099 MHz over HF... 45.45 baud should be enough for anyone! :-D

@davidgerard im ready for it. Im sure i can remember
@davidgerard my ham shack is ready for web5.
@davidgerard I'm still betting on netcat, which has "cat" right in the name.

@davidgerard

```
GET / HTTP/1.1
Host: example.com
```

@davidgerard Yeah... I actually did that this afternoon, for actual bloody Reasons.

Didn't quite work: eventually I ended up strace(1)ing a process, dumping out the full strings from calls to recvfrom(2) in hex escape form, and printf(3C)ing the damned thing. All to extract a JSON schema that should be documented somewhere but AFAICT isn't.

I hate modern shit. Can we go back to 1995's web, please?

@davidgerard but I brushed the cobwebs off my semaphore flags and did necromancy on a homing pigeon