Brian, this gave me pleasant flashbacks about my first discovery of the net when back in '95 someone showed me I could magically retrieve ASCII documents from a US department via a gopher connection from my terminal. That's really cool, I thought.

There was Internet back in these old days? Wow :)

Nils, there sure was. I was retrieving CIA country information via Gopher from 1989 (or shortly after): there was Internet - but there was no Web yet. ;) You could even do Gopher-by-email; in fact, you could access nearly every service available on the Internet by email: someone(s) somewhere would have written an email gateway/service for that: all you needed to know was the email address and how to format your request. So that's how I got those country information documents, too: by email. Wow indeed. :)