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Those were the early days of HTTP, so no, people didn't really get a lot of HTTP "manually" like that. We used other existing tools to get gopher and ftp though.

When I started my work on httpget in 1996, I didn't know about wget and I didn't become aware of it until several years later....

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I would figure that by 1997 most people stopped using gopher/archive/veronica. I think I stopped by 1995 or so.

now days we use curl/wget for web dev it seems? probably used it for the same thing back then but I also image that lots of people just used their own ad-hoc scripts or whatever; i wish i had firsthand knowledge of that.

i used wget to download copies of websites when i found one that was mostly documents/images rather than webapps.

I use wget for plain, old regular downloads a lot. If I need to save a file to a specific place (e.g. datasheets to a doc/ directory in my project) and I have a terminal already open there (which I usually do), doing wget and middle-click is far more convenient than dealing with the browsers' "Save to..." dialog. Especially ever since they started considering a sane download manager to be one of those confusing features that users totally don't want.

> I use wget for plain, old regular downloads a lot.

I loved wget for that. what are your options? Mine was always -r -p -k -nH --cut-dirs=2 -np

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