Read at your own risk
2011 October 1/10:32 PM
This document dates from the early web period, and is kept for archival purposes only. It is no longer updated, and contains much that is apocryphal, or at least wildly inaccurate.A long time ago, the web was not the only way of accessing the net. There was also FTP, Gopher, and even email.
Back when everyone on the net trusted everyone else, one of the things we trusted was e-mail. So you could find lots of ways of accessing the net by e-mail. You could ask for hundreds of kilobytes of data by e-mail, and have it sent back to you. That, of course, changed when we realized we couldn’t trust you to use your own e-mail address on the request.
These instructions are for the old Cerebus the Gopher, back when it actually was a Gopher server, using Peter Lewis’s FTPd.- Using the Cerebus Macintosh server
- Back when browsing the web meant fingering gophers, Cerebus ran on a Macintosh 7100/80 in my bedroom, over a telephone modem.
- Cerebus FTP by E-Mail
- Yes, that’s right. At one time you could browse this web site by sending e-mails to it and getting files in response.
- Using Cerebus the Gopher
- When I moved to Apache on a hosted server, I also moved to procmail to manage e-mail requests. FTP and Gopher were gone, but e-mail lived on.
More Negative Space
- Fresh new Negative Space
- I’ve just moved all of Negative Space over to new servers at WebFaction. Please let me know if you see anything missing!
