"I do NOT use browsers, I use the SSH protocol. If the network requires a proxy for SSH, I probably can't use it at all."
I wondered if this applied to all net usage or just email, turns out he never uses a web browser, ever. If he needs the contents of a web page, he emails a daemon which wgets the page and emails it back to him: http://lwn.net/Articles/262570/
This takes me back. In the early/mid 90s, particularly in Universities, internet was slow as molasses and many of us used these mail interfaces, for web and also for FTP (FTPmail). In many places email was given most of the bandwidth and it was a lot faster like that. Big files would come Uuencoded in several parts. In Uni, usually pics of Cindy Crawford and Erika Eleniak among others.
Now it seems incredibly geeky but back then it wasn't anything remarkable at all.
My first web usage was via message exchange with a local BBS which did UUCP e-mail exchanges every 4 hours. I e-mailed my request to an e-mail <-> web gateway at CERN, and got my page back in the next exchange.
Thankfully that only lasted a year before I got proper access.
And yes, I remember FTPmail, as well as similar gateways for Gopher, Veronica, Archie, WAIS... I feel old now.
I wondered if this applied to all net usage or just email, turns out he never uses a web browser, ever. If he needs the contents of a web page, he emails a daemon which wgets the page and emails it back to him: http://lwn.net/Articles/262570/