It’s all there in black and white

Today, most people access content on the Internet through graphical tools such as Internet Explorer, Outlook and various instant messagers. In 1993, GUI based Internet programs like Eudora (email), Fetch (FTP) and Ircle (IRC) existed for the Macintosh. However, dialed into a remote Unix server at a (now) glacially slow 2400 bps from a Windows 3.1 machine I didn’t have access to such tools. What I did have was a black and white Unix console through which I could run various command line tools.

Connection to the Cairo account was through the Windows Terminal program; basic, black and white, but mostly functional. Dial in, select the Cairo server from the list of options, enter your username and password and you were then presented with the Unix command prompt. From there it was type mail for email (later pine was made available, I still use it today), nn for newsgroups and

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