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In Russia we served HTTP traffic on non-standard ports, such as 8100, 8101, 8102 in addition to default 80. It was very common in 90s. Can anyone guess, why?


i give up, tell us why!


To solve the problem with non-US character-encoding. Web browsers of 90s were notoriously bad with client-side encoding. The only way to show content properly for all available clients was server-side recoding and different HTTP ports were used to serve content with different encoding - ISO, DOS, Windows and KOI. Each web-page had a set of links, usually in top-right corner, labeled as "ISO", "DOS", "Win" and "KOI" which transferred you to corresponding HTTP port.


i was actually going to guess this. very interesting.




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