I miss the walnut creek days of ftp.cdrom.com. Many an id demo and FreeBSD isos downloaded. Before that I knew of them from actually buying their CD's in the mid 90's before we had the internet.
this reminds me of poking around on my ISP's shell server to find warez drops other people had put there.
... now I can smell magic: the gathering cards for some reason.
+++ATH
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/wininet/n...
Downloading from HTTP has always been messy, specially for big files. The FTP API been always rock solid.
Edit: Apparently the Gopher API is also still available!
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/wininet/n...
and even has websites!
In January 2020, Veronica indexed 395 gopher servers,[16] within which it indexed approximately 4.5 million unique selectors. http://gopher.floodgap.com/gopher/gw?gopher/0/v2/vstat
There was a time where you could replace “www” for “ftp” and in most occasions there would be a file listing!
It was known to some at my university (or maybe just me) pronounced as "Srk Dok Ik Ak Uk".