I was offered the chance to write Internet For Dummies way back when. I turned ’em down, of course. Back then there was no web, so the Internet was a boring and nerdy place. Things have changed, but as a review, here are some obsolete Internet technologies you might have read about in the first edition of Internet For Dummies (had I written it).

Email. It’s still with us, and basically the same technology it was decades ago.

FTP. The File Transfer Protocol is still around, but even back in the early days it was one way to find and fetch files on the Internet. The problem: There was no index for those files, so you had to go on hunting expeditions to find things. In fact, most of the early Internet technologies were merely convenient ways to get to those files you could access by FTP.

The ftp:// URL still works today. It’s a common way to get files stored on Internet servers.

Usenet. The original, massive bullet board for the Internet. Not only were messages exchanged, but also binary files — including pirated software and tons of pornography.

To get at Usenet you needed a Usenet reader, which was often just your e-mail program. In fact, only recently have some e-mail programs dropped their support for reading Usenet, which often goes by the moniker “news.”

You also needed some text-to-binary conversion tools if you wanted to grab files from Usenet, which was slow, awkward, and hogged bandwidth like no one’s business.

Only recently has Usenet been more-or-less retired. The web replaced it rather quickly.

WAIS. Pronounced “ways” the Wide Area Information Servers was a text-searching system for the Internet. It was the dawn of the era of “we have too much information and no way to get at it.”

The information found on the Internet in the early days was purely text, not really graphical like it is today. Of course, none of it was indexed, so WAIS started the trend of indexing and providing searching methods for finding the stuff you were looking for.

Gopher. It was a play on the word gofer — you know, the schlep who has to run errands and do things for you, to “go for” something. It might have also been named after the University of Minnesota mascot, as the technology came from that university.

The Gopher was a way to fetch information on the Internet in a organized manner. It used WAIS and formatted the output to make things organized.

You can still visit Gopher servers on the Internet, though there’s only a few of them left. The gopher:// protocol is still a valid URL for most web browsers (but apparently not Safari!).

Veronica. Archie. Jughead. Yeah, they’re antique comic book characters, but they were also backronymed to be various Internet technologies. Here’s the way they worked out into acronyms:

Veronica: Very Easy Rodent-Oriented Net-wide Index to Computer Archives.
Archie: Basically, a play on the word “archive,” but related to Veronica and…
Jughead: Jonzy’s Universal Gopher Hierarchy Excavation And Display

Now aren’t you glad that the Web spared you from all this? Imagine what hell the Internet could have been!