Sometimes just plain telnet. It wasn't pretty, but it worked:

    $ telnet 80
    GET /

It should be noted that the above isn't a strict HTTP request header, it's missing quite a lot of detail, but it works as an example.

Add two newlines and that is a perfectly valid HTTP/0.9 request.

Pre curl/wget that was probably sufficient.

HTTP/1.1 wasn't around until 1996 so back then Host: headers weren't even "optional". They simply didn't exist yet.

That's what HTTP/0.9 requests look like!

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....

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

In the HTTP/1.0 days I used telnet quite a bit. Or libwww-perl, when Perl was the language of choice for web applications. LWP has copyright notice:

Copyright 1995-2009, Gisle Aas

Copyright 1995, Martijn Koster

Round about then I wrote something similar to WWW::Mechanize in order to automate access to the Orange Web-SMS gateway, which had an inconveniently deep login procedure.

Perl? I have only the vaguest recollection of those days. It looks like LWP is about 20 years old[1]. It's based on libwww which goes back to 1992[2].

[1] http://search.cpan.org/~ether/libwww-perl/ (see changelog)

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libwww

`lynx -dump` was a very useful tool.

I had to use that the other year whilst attempting to migrate an old old old Slackware box running on two Pentium 3s with an array of SCSI disks (so quite fancy for its time!). The machine had kernel sources that were different to the kernel running so no chance of compiling various bits of software, and I couldn't grab any GCC (EGCS?) binaries from anywhere.

I can't remember what I eventually did but I do remember discovering lynx -dump, so thanks for the reminder!

I still can't stop myself typing `lynx -mime_header` to see server headers!

why not

  lynx -head -dump http://httpbin.org

Your version dumps the body as well, which is hard to parse if you just need the headers.

On another note: Thanks for curl - it's always high up in my charts somehow. Right now #2 in

  history 0 | awk '{print $2}' | sort | uniq -c | sort -n -r | head -n 20

How long have GET/POST commands been around? Probably not as long, but just curious.

The first documented version of HTTP was HTTP V0.9 (1991) has only GET: http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/Protocols/HTTP/AsImplemented.html

Basic HTTP as defined in 1992 had GET, PUT, HEAD, POST, LINK, TEXTSEARCH, CHECKIN, etc.: http://www.w3.org/Protocols/HTTP/Methods.html

More generic info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypertext_Transfer_Protocol

I believe they originally come from the libwww-perl project? According to wikipedia it was first released with perl 4.0036, which was in Februrary 1993, but I can't find out if it included GET and HEAD etc already then...

They're mentioned in a February 1996 changelog entry for libwww-perl, so at least 19 years.

RFC 1945 dated may 1996 mentions GET and POST methods

http://www.rfc-base.org/txt/rfc-1945.txt

HTTP has been in use by the World-Wide Web global information initiative since 1990. This specification reflects common usage of the protocol referred to as "HTTP/1.0".

I used netcat - and still do for interacting with protocols in ways that curl doesn't support. AFAIK it was released in 1995, so it's only three years older than curl.

telnet and get