Slashdot Mirror
How Moore's Law Saved Us From the Gopher Web
Urchin writes "In the early 1990s, the World Wide Web was a power-hungry monster unpopular with network administrators, says Robert Topolski, chief technologist of the Open Technology Initiative. They preferred the sleek text-only Gopher protocol. Had they been able to use data filtering technology to prioritize gopher traffic Topolski thinks the World Wide Web might not have survived. But it took computers another decade or so to be powerful enough to give administrators that option, and by that time the Web was already enormously popular." My geek imagination is now all atwitter imagining an alternate gopher-driven universe.
Am I the only one who found this quote from the article ironic:
"Although it now stretches to fewer than 100 sites there is still fun to be had in the text-only web, providing your web browser still supports Gopher."
I think the author of this article either doesn't know what he's talking about or got confused. Gopher sites are not part of the web at all, and definitely aren't part of some "text-only" web. Maybe text-only gopher, but definitely not the web.
Phil