Tired of the Modern Web? Discover some ‘Retro’ protocols you still can use today

Are you tired of heavy web pages, browser pop-ups, flashing banners, N-factor authentication, user tracking and analytics? Well, there are some protocols that have not changed in the last 30 years and you can still try using them.

People were browsing online pages this way about 30 years ago

Let’s get started.

FTP

The FTP (File Transfer Protocol) is not only “old”, but “ancient”, compared to modern standards — the first specification was published as RFC 114 on 16 April 1971. Actually, there was no Internet at that time, computers were connected to the ARPA (Advanced Research Projects Agency) network, and there was an obvious demand to have a protocol for files exchange. Of course, this protocol was not something immutable, lots of improvements were made, and the phrase “FTP has had a long evolution over the years” was written in the “RFC 959” document published in 1985. This document also has internal links to the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and the Telnet Protocol, which were described in the “ARPA-Internet protocol handbook” in 1985 (when most people did not hear the word “Internet” at all).

The FTP can be used today, for example, for remote server maintenance, but surprisingly, public anonymous FTPs are also available. I’ve searched in Google using the words “public FTP list”, and got a website https://www.mmnt.net which has a pretty large list of open FTP sites:

Readers who wish to get a feeling of how it was working many years ago, can try to log in to the FTP using the command line. I tried the first link, and it really works:

Of course, it would be much easier to use any modern FTP client, something like FAR Manager or Midnight Commander will be even more “in line” with that era and will also give an idea of how the old-school text UI was used: