What is on Your Mind?

Of course, back then there was basically only sendmail if you wanted to build a reliable email infrastructure.

We used Slackware v0.8 and broken PCs in USAF to replace broken MS Mail hosts back in those days (we also used the same configuration for DNS servers, etc). Usenet, I was never fond of.. .too much flame wars (and spam) for my taste. I never liked IRC or BBS very much .... sorry.

What to the changes happened - migrating from Gopher/WAIS/... to Web etc - well, just because something is used everywhere it must not be better, compare, for example, IDE and SCSI hard disc drives. Or Volkswagen and Porsche.

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I can understand you, same problem we can see today in Web It's not the problem of technology, it's problem of people.
Sendmail - great thing, at the moment i learn it. Have been using it for about two or three years now, but only simple things - i want more.

It is easier for most people to cling to what they are familiar with than to embrace change.

For that reason there traditionally were administrators - system, network, database etc admins. They control everything and give the users what they want, what they are familiar with. Other side - it is not only about people, it is also about data. An organization needs to keep its data for (very) long time. Not only to keep all the data, but also be able to work with it at any moment. That means that they also need to keep their software, which means they need to keep hardware the software was designed for. All the changes like WWW instead of Gopher/WAIS/etc and Windows 7 instead of Windows 95 go against that. Generally, if my old Windows 95 (or even DOS!) works perfectly with what i have, why do i have to change from it to Windows 7? Why do i have to change just anything? It's not in my interest. However, software producers seem not to care about their customers' interests really lot, not only because of all the unneeded changes but especially when reading that some programs do things they should never do, like collecting users' data and transferring it outside (Word, Outlook, _Internet Explorer_, etc). Web and Windows etc might be progressive in some areas, but they have to respect what i think and what i need and what i want as user, operator, customer; in the fact, the model of economy itself tells that the customer decides about everything, as far as i know. The customer is the King, the customer is always right, "Pa-ba-a-am! The Customer is here!". However, like Ric - or what was his name? - in "Falling Down" said, "It is not our policy" - or something like this, seems to be so.

I used archie before we had the modern search engines. It is not even installed anymore as a standard.
Before we had internet, we had people in the department working on hypercard (HyperCard - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia) and interacted with each other over AppleTalk.
I only remember CompuServe as being the first portal-like piece of software.

figaro,
as far as i can recall there was some archie server software availabe on the net last two years, however, you might to know where to look for it. On the other side, it might be possible to develop one's own archie-like script.

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What is also cool, in my view, is when some server offers the possibility to "order" web sites over email - one sends a request per email, with web address, and receives shortly after that the desired web site. It might be more comfortable to get html pages in that way than to start a web browser which will slow down the whole system and maybe cause some data losses and other problems.

@action: indeed, I am sure it is still there as a forgotten module one can install. But it was good, because you could not only search, but do some very basic filtering with grep afterwards to increase relevance of the search results. The modern search engines gave a tremendous speed increase, so archie was soon shelved. In fact, the concept of being able to search web pages using a web page (of the search engine) is numbingly trivial now, but was very novel at the time.