I've read about BITNET, CompuServe... CompuServe was probably not a network but an online service. Are (were) there any other networks alternative to Internet? Does anyone have experience with them? Do they still exist, is it possible to access them over Internet? There seems not to be another way at the moment... Generally, who can tell more about them?
I used compuserve back in the day. It was a network of sorts, at least among its service half. Ordinary people dialed in. I was quite young at the time but I remember it mostly as a ball of services. My father used it instead of DATAPAC to access medical research, it meant that instead of having to sign up for access to one silly remote mainframe at exorbatant prices then fight for dial-in time, you could sign up for compuserve and access it more cheaply and conveniently -- if that system was offered on compuserve. They also had something like email, file repositories, and forums, and a search that could (slowly) trawl through them all.
It's all gone now as far as I can tell. Compuserve bit by bit became an internet provider instead of a compuserve provider, compuserve messaging dumped for more globally-useful email, compuserve search dumped for, in those days, the woefully more primitive web spiders... It's only now that Google's parcelled up its internet search that it's anything like it was. Forums and repositories either dumped outright or converted to web, prices going up as their lucrative big services dumped them to make web interfaces(so they could charge ordinary people ridiculous prices again, bleh!).
If there's not decent internet access where you are, the data lines just may not be there. Compuserve was built out of data lines too.
Corona688, yow it's interesting what you told. For me it's not about problems with Internet access, otherewise i wouldn't write here. For me it's about modern junk and good old things like gopher, uucp, and so on.
IMHO, there was nothing "good old things" about gopher, uucp, etc. I used gopher, wais, uucp ,etc and am glad they are relics of the past, personally speaking.
For me, there is nothing nostalgic about those old applications. The "Modern Junk" as you call it, is much, much better, in my opinion.
Yow, cool! What's about WAIS? Are there still any WAIS servers on the Net today? When speaking of what is junk and what's not, it is of course a personal position of each, for me better are old-style real things like ed, for example, email, uucp, you know, such things, and all of that in command line. If i had a real COM terminal, it would be great! The problem is that seems not to be any of them today any more. By the way, what do you think of z39.50? Is a pretty thing, huh?
I was a consultant at the National Science Foundation (NSF) and tried to get the "top brass" to drop Gopher/WAIS for HTML/WWW. They thought I was crazy and fought me tooth-and-nail. It was really funny, there I was, configuring Solaris machines for NSF and redesigning CommerceNet (as the "contractor" lead architect for CommerceNet) for WWW, being told by the NSF scientists that I was "a radical" because I told them Gopher/WAIS was "dead" and they should convert to WWW.
Thank you for reminding me of those days..... much appreciated. It reminds me of the many ironies in my career in the late 1980s and early 90s...... Can you believe I was "attacked" for telling the NSF that Gopher/WAIS would be overcome by HTML/WWW then? Their scientists said "no way!"....
Another story....
When I demo'ed HTML/WWW to the USAF (again as a consultant/contractor), the support squadron told a top general that WWW could only read, not write to a database. I stopped them and said "not true, there is nothing in the protocol to prohibit read/write" and got in trouble then...
What a wacky, political world we live in!
Did you work with sendmail? Usenet news? IRC? BBS?
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.