alt Hacker NewsAs a kid in the late 90s my mind was blown when I realized I could telnet to port 80, 25, or 110 and interact with the servers manually.
Simple get: GET / HTTP/1.1 Content-Type: text/html User-Agent: l33t hax0rs lol X-Funny-Monkey: farts
For sending a mail message on port 25: HELO mail-from: [email protected] mail-to: [email protected] <other headers> <blank line> Body of the message yay. <two blank lines to end>
POP3 was so long ago I forgot but you could list the mailboxes then get individual messages and so on.
This revelation was the beginning of "there is no magic" for me. The realization that every part of the computer was built by human beings and was at some level understandable if one undertook the effort.
Perhaps most people in the future won't bother. They'll just let agents do it all. I'm sure that will leave some interesting holes in various systems for people willing to actually learn how they work without the filter of a model (or its safety rails).
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Me too! Writing Winsock and learning WinAPI on XP then Vista. It took me a while to realise Linux was better / OSX was my gateway drug haha
Last century I would read and send personal email from work using telnet to pop3 and smtp respectively.
I must have tried to write the same "perfect" IRC client from scratch in C a dozen times growing up...
When I was 12, I learned about open SMTP relays and how to spoof email this way. I once spoofed an email between two rivals on a community I was a part of and started a flame war.
Good times.
Yep! It’s all just text files. Lots of acronyms in top of lots of ways to generate, send, and read structured text files.
One day I realized even databases were just text files and I had to sit down.