TRICKLE
A file server for BITNET and EARN that let users without FTP fetch software from the internet's big archives — a drop at a time, as the name promised.
BITNET machines could send mail and files to each other over NJE, but most had no TCP/IP and therefore no FTP. Archives such as SIMTEL20 were out of reach. TRICKLE, written at Ege University in Izmir around 1990, ran on a mainframe that mirrored the archives and accepted orders as commands in a message. Files came back as BITNET files dropped into the user's reader.
TRICKLE was soon running at several sites across Europe, which eased the load on the expensive transatlantic link: a file only had to cross the Atlantic to the nearest mirror, not once per requester. Daily download quotas were still tight and the queues long. Once universities got proper internet connections in the 1990s the need disappeared — and the service with it.