I the early 90s I contributed to the then hot communications technology -- Gopher. I built Sextant, the first (non-Hypercard) Gopher client for the Macintosh. Even today it has one feature that I miss in browsers and that is saving window position and size information kept with a bookmark: Having this allowed you to organize your desktop and then quickly restore it on restart.

A few places standardized on it. But in the end it died out as TurboGopher (I think this is what it was called) come out and had support for many more data types. I don't know what happened to Sextant's code.

Thanks to Google I can still see my announcements:

http://groups.google.com/groups? q=sextant+gopher&selm=9209101851.AA20207% 40brown.edu&rnum=2

What was bigger than Sextant was it inspired me to start the THINK Class Library mailing list. The TCL was a class library that came with the Lightspeed compiler. This was my first introduction to C++ and application frameworks. It was a good introduction as C++ was small, TCL was small, and it allowed me to build a good Macintosh application with much less effort and with more features than anything I had done previously. I wanted to share my experience with TCL with others and to get others help in using it better. The mailing list (later the news group comp.sys.mac.oop.tcl) and code archive lasted for several years. It even survived the transition from my maintenance to others. It to had a natural death as other technologies surpassed it.

Thanks to Google I can still see my announcements:

http://groups.google.com/groups? q=gilmartin+tcl&selm=1g8eiaINNroo% 40cat.cis.Brown.EDU&rnum=1

What was novel about the archive at the time was that I organized it by contributor and topic. At the time all archives where anonymous FTP hierarchies organizaed by topic. I felt that the contributor should get as much acknowledgement as the code contributed.