That's the way it all used to be, back when the net started rolling out. You could hook up to whatever you wanted, even roll your own protocol, just using either telnet or some sort of quasi-primitive scripting.

Now everything you touch has dozens of layers of junk on it -- and it's all mostly http.

It was a lot more fun when you were free to do your own thing without having to carry around 40 tons of tooling.