Archie, Veronica, and WAIS, Oh My!

Oh goodness! Here I go again. Wandering down the dark, long-forgotten corners of the Net.

I was dipping into some old Patchwork Jumble drafts when I got started down a particular rabbithole.  This one led finally to a very old issue of the Internet Scout Report that contained the following:

Expanded 2nd edition of Accessing The Internet By E-Mail: shows you how to retrieve files from FTP sites, explore the Internet via Gopher, search for information with Archie, Veronica, or WAIS, tap into the World-Wide Web, and even access Usenet newsgroups using E-MAIL as your only tool. Lots of new stuff as a result of comments received from around the world. Check out the updated Net Goodies section! New info on European mail servers. [emphases are mine]

(I’ve been an Internet Scout Report subscriber since, oh, the days when movable type was new. Well, maybe not that long; but at least since the days when the Web — or as it was quaintly called back then, The World-Wide Web — was only just beginning to be more widely used)

The Net has become a near monobi-culture now: Web and Email.  Facebook? Web. Twitter? Web. Google+? Web.

Yes, I know; there are the apps.  The latest, greatest one — available by invitation only at this time — is Spotify.  Yes, it’s an app; but you can’t tell me that it has (or will have) anywhere near the eyeballs looking at it as all the Web pages taken together (or just Google, for that matter).

Sometimes I long for the linear, unfolding  simplicity of a gopher site! The fancifully named “Veronica”! (Oh, and those who know gopher will know why I chose “unfolding” as a modifier just now.)

Anyway. getting back to the quote above.  How many of the boldfaced services did you ever use?