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Comment by cdogl | Hacker News Reader

The trick that really opened my eyes was this:

  $ telnet google.com 80
  Trying 142.250.70.238...
  Connected to google.com.
  Escape character is '^]'.
  GET / HTTP/1.1

  HTTP/1.1 200 OK

Then adding a couple of headers - and realising that it really was just text. You can really tell the difference with young developers who've made that leap.

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Ditto for HTTPS:

    % openssl s_client -quiet -connect  google.com:443
    depth=2 OU = GlobalSign Root CA - R2, O = GlobalSign, CN = GlobalSign
    verify return:1
    depth=1 C = US, O = Google Trust Services, CN = GTS CA  1O1
    verify return:1
    depth=0 C = US, ST = California, L = Mountain View, O = Google LLC, CN = *.google.com
    verify return:1
    GET / HTTP/1.1
    Connection: close
    
    
    HTTP/1.1 200 OK

I did Tech support at a small ISP a while ago, and this was part of our first day of training. So was sending email via telnet. There was an optional challenge to add an attachment.

I'm old enough to remember the good ole days of "telnet whitehouse.gov 25" and sending email to friends.

I find CGIs very interesting when scaling towards n=1 – they just do a bit of parsing and add no dependencies to your project. And with very few code (and still no dependencies) you get tiny, useful tools (plug alarm!) like https://demo.mro.name/geohash.cgi

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