But, seriously, that got me curious. There are many protocols from that early era that are still with us today. NTP, DNS, SMTP, IMAP, BGP, SNMP, NFS, ICMP. If you allow the 1990's as counting as "old" we can add SSH and SSL, DHCP, LDAP.
What we sometimes call SSL is not the same SSL as back then. That said, TLS was released in 1999, so it just barely makes the cut. :D
Just imagine hosting that history on your instance for users and then some vibecoder without care in his work starts scanning it automatically every 5 seconds just in case it might have changed...
Future generations are going to be looking at a historical black hole.
Also usenet is still very popular but mostly used for file sharing.
Except, unlike Reddit, it wasn't centralized nor owned by a single corporation.
Usenet users did not have to obey the rules and whims of any corporation and there was thriving ecosystem of feature rich, free and open Usenet clients.
I really miss having my own killfiles and regex search abilities that were common on Usenet clients, but is missing from the Reddit clients and its web UI.
The eternal September complaint comes to mind, but even eternal September was a jolly walk in the park compared to what modern social media has turned into.
Spam filtering has improved a lot since the Usenet days, but even if it hadn't we had killfiles to deal with the spam and filtering out harrasers. Doing this today would be even easier with the help of LLMs.
FTP is useful for bidirectional file exchange over the Internet. There are other protocols, but they all have drawbacks. SFTP can be used for similar functionality, but it requires users to have SSH access. SMB and NFS don’t really work so well over the Internet and are a pain to configure for multiple users. For setting up accounts dedicated to transferring files, you really can’t beat FTP (or really FTPS, which is just FTP over SSL).
Security-wise you set it not to run commands (and maybe chroot) and you're done, right? And difficulty-wise isn't granting SSH access very similar to FTP access?
I don't understand the issue.
But in the most common case a "system account" is a line in two text files, isn't it?
More illuminating: To what (relative) extend? And what's the trajectory?
Looking at Google Trends: https://trends.google.com/explore?q=%2Fm%2F03t2s%2C%2Fg%2F11...
that modality is long dead. we still have email but it's not that same ... I however could take mirc from like 1995 and still use everything.