IMHO the interesting thing about the emails is it provides insight into his process of asking for it. He had done all of the other work ahead of time and even provided the draft protocol spec in his email. He also was willing to accept a different port number assignment, but gently suggested just continuing what they had been using during local testing. Had he asked in a very terse manner or not done as much legwork up front, then conceivably he might not have received a port assignment at all.

Which is pretty neat in its own right. It's easy to romanticize those days (which no doubt had plenty of their own problems), but something like this seems to say a bit about how the early web came to be. It's hard to think of something as fundamental nowadays as ssh as just some new program making its way onto mailing lists with its author (Tatu Ylonen) probably wondering whether it would go anywhere.

And that's what's amazing, and shows what a different time the internet was in the 90s.