I am working on an appliance using an old version of python (2.5.2).
I'm working on a script which needs to read a webpage, but I can't access the normal libraries
 - urllib, urllib2 and requests are not available.
How did people collect this in the olden days? 
I could do a wget/curl from the shell, but I'd prefer to stick to python if possible. I also need to be able to go through a proxy which may force me into system calls.
If you really want to do it old-school entirely within Python but without urllib, then you'll have to use socket and implement a tiny subset of HTTP 1.0 to fetch the page. Jumping through the hoops to get through a proxy will be really painful though.
Use wget or curl and save yourself a few days of debugging.
collect web page source with python 2.5.2