[Air-l] folder and file names as direct speech
elijah wright
elw at stderr.org
Sun Dec 12 13:16:35 PST 2004
> 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
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