Shell-account enhancers
This article describes a family of programs that had become popular when
Internet access in India was scarce and expensive. Shell-account enhancers
were programs that let students and people who couldn't afford $300/month
TCP/IP accounts surf the web using graphical browsers (like say Netscape
Mosaic:) over shell accounts. The idea was simple
- to run a local HTTP proxy and transform every request into a UNIX command
that would be sent via the terminal and fetch the HTML source, embedded
images etc. and pass them on to the browser. Curiously, the government-owned
monopoly, VSNL would periodically block the relevant UNIX commands. So for
instance, first you couldn't do a 'telnet proxy.xyz.com 80' anymore, then
pressing 'D' under lynx stopped downloading HTML files... What followed was
a game of cat and mouse between VSNL and the authors of this software. It
was good fun till VSNL changed combat tactics...