[Air-l] folder and file names as direct speech

[elijah wright]

> This is (or was) common practice on filesharing networks - not the p2p 
> kind, but the kinds where you use a client to log onto a network of 
> servers, some of which will let you in for free, others which only let 
> you in if you type in the fifth word of the twentieth line of a website 
> you only get to after viewing a long ad for porn, some which will let 
> you in but won't let you download any warez unless you upload some 
> first, and yet others which only let members or perhaps even friends log

sounds to me like you're talking about a melange of IRC DCC Fserves and 
0-day warez FTP sites.  which, or both, did you intend?

> Though I think the clients often permit chat, there's not much 
> opportunity for chatting - so communication between users and 
> administrative information is all given through the file system.

in the case of IRC-driven Fserves, sure, you can chat.  In the case of 
FTP, not.

> I assume gopher used to work like this before the web, though I never 
> tried it?

As a pre-web gopher user, I never had the sense that gopher was 
tremendously different than the web.  That might just be a symptom of the 
way that I used gopher, though.

Gopher was (typically) pretty directory- and hierarchy-oriented.  I think 
there are some reasonable analogies to be drawn, here, yes.

Gopher, Veronica, and Archie were all good, useful tools.

--elijah