You find a free (or dirt cheap) CGI-BIN web hoster and FTP your programs there. Files for your message board or site counter are saved in the /CGI-BIN/ directory too. You upload new files to run arbitrary commands and use those commands to walk around the system that you otherwise have no access to. You discover another customer on the same shared host who is selling real estate in Alabama. You consider it strange that all the users have the same group ID, and so can access each other's files. Later on you learn about suEXEC and get some cash to help somebody configure their web server. Two decades later you're doing basically the same job and wonder why it feels so much more difficult now.
I hosted my first website with CSoft back in the last 90s after getting kicked off the student server at Uni for hogging too many resources. Had a C executable dropped in cgi-bin doing all the heavy lifting.
Major deja-vu 20 years later throwing a Golang executable up on a server; really felt like I was back where I started.
