Prestel
In 1983, the Prestel messaging service known as “Prestel Mailbox” was launched, initially hosted on the computer known as "Enterprise", and later available from all IRC computers by means of a centralised messaging computer known as "Pandora". This facility extended the original day one concept of “Response Frames” whereby an end user could send a message back to the IP who owned the page via special pages, for example to order goods or services. The user’s name, address, telephone number, and date could be added automatically to the message when the IP set up the response frame by means of codes which triggered extraction of key data from the users account held on the IRC computer. Initially response frames were ingathered by an IP from each IRC individually, but later the facility to collect messages from all IRCs at the UDC from where they could be ingathered centrally was implemented, and with the introduction of Mailbox, they could be retrieved from any IRC.
Internet Content Adaptation Protocol
ICAP was proposed in late 1999 by Peter Danzig and John Schuster from Network Appliance. Don Gillies took over the project in the spring of 2000 and enhanced the protocol in three main ways:
Gillies prototyped the first ICAP client and server for the NetCache series of internet caches in mid-2000 (known as ICAP 0.9 protocol) and produced training materials for vendors. The client was written in C++ in the core of the NetCache server, and the demonstration ICAP Server was written in Perl and employed the Debian word-replacement filters to rewrite web pages, skipping over the HTML tags, and translating web pages into Swedish Chef or Jive in real time. With knowledge learned from the prototyping experience, Gillies revised the IETF draft standard to make RPCs using only chunked encoding, greatly simplifying the ICAP protocol.