The gopher protocol suddenly came to mind, leading to visiting:
gopher protocol Wikipedia entry
which had me realizing the 'elinks' client I usually use for http(s) on the command line could also work the gopher protocol, which I tried against a link in the aforementioned a la:
> elinks gopher://gopher.floodgap.com/1/world
which, wow... floods of nostalgia, especially the ASCII art, and the mention of "zines"- which I recalled hunting for in the lowest shelf of one of the magazine racks at the Barnes and Noble nearest the house in which I lived in "upstate New York" back in those ohmyeffinggosh 1990s days.
Nostalgia is a hell of a drug.