> I feel sorry that USENET is gone. The experience of using a good NNTP newsreader was way way better than the terrible phpBB forums that supplanted it. And the next generation of programmers simply copied the phpBB ideas because they've never seen anything better. So now we have to live with those "forums" where you can't find anything, and you have to wade through screenfuls of decoration just to see any content at all.

For a while, we had gopher, nntp, telnet, ftp, etc. but http/web ultimately provided a more general platform on which you could construct a wide variety of applications without needing to switch clients, removing friction and creating bridges.