> I guess kudos to whomever wrote Yahoo's webserver to make proper sense of such wonky requests, though I think it was far too liberal in what it accepted.
Depending on exactly when, you may have been hitting Yahoo's custom http server originally written by David Filo or yapache, a patched version of Apache 1.3.
20 years ago, picking up OCaml, as an initial project I decided to write a password cracker to run against my WiFi router. The webserver on my WRT-54G was sending back errors, but Yahoo's webserver (more popular than Google at the time) was perfectly happy replying correctly to my HTTP client's requests.
I had to break out Ethereal (since renamed Wireshark) to debug why Yahoo was fine with my HTTP client but my WRT-54G wasn't. It turns out I didn't realize that OCaml character escapes that began with zero were still decimal, not octal (unlike C). So, I was sending a line terminator of vertical-tab shift-in instead of carriage-return line-feed. I guess kudos to whomever wrote Yahoo's webserver to make proper sense of such wonky requests, though I think it was far too liberal in what it accepted.