OK -- put on your 70s bell bottoms, and step into the WayBack machine for this.... disco lives again folks.... (And I doubt there's a tag for this...)
I need the successor to UUCP. For you kids out there, before the Internet, and after the Bysyncian Era, we had to have e-mail and file transfer on Unix machines. (rec.humor.funny doesn't get around by itself you know...) Great tribes of SysAdmins would fire up their telebit trailblazers and push mail and files from machine to machine via the "Bang path". (I was ...!crash!jack!wolf!soft21!jantypas if anyone can decipher the ancient symbols... PC Pursuit forever!) We did this because all we had were asynchronous phone calls -- none of that fancy always on ARPANet.... or those kids with BITNet....
Believe it or not, there are still places in the world that don't have always on Internet or its expensive enough that we can't keep it up more than an hour or two a night. Think of schools in very remote areas....
What's the successor? Is there a successor? Can I use something like Jabber if I can get Jabber to hold messages and pass them node to node as the links come up? Any ideas?
I don't need the phone modem part -- TCP/IP is fine, but these are for rural schools in Nigeria where we're lucky to have electric power for a few hours, let alone solid bandwidth. UUCP allowed me to poll and exchange in both directions during the poll event.
And in honor of the greats...
A host is a host from coast to coastAnd no one will connect with a host that's closeUnless the host hat isn't close Is busy, hung or dead