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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.
Oh Archie and Veronica, how I miss thee.
If you want to see an old style yet tasteful web page, visit my vintage 2000 Open Slate Project site. It features a "3D" background, another fad that faded. No Flash. I do need to spend more time updating that site.
Gary Dunn
Open Slate Project
Yes it was- people went nuts with images on their pages.
Oh, how history repeats itself: first they went nuts with images. Then it was animated images, and about the same time, flashing text. Then it was flash animations. Now, it's XML. Try using the complex gmail view in HTML mode sometime. There's no reason whatsoever that it should use more bandwidth to send an email (once the system has loaded) via that interface than through the simple HTML view; in fact, it should take less. Nope! It takes more.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Badgerbadgerbadger.com is not connected with the creator of the flash movie, it is just some guy trying to profiteer over the meme. Stick with linking to the original authors, not the leeches.
Back in the mid-1990's, the most economical internet connection for small companies was a 64Kb ISDN link billed by the kilobyte, with a local university as the ISP. As most conference announcements were broadcast by USENET, the store-and-forward service was so slow, it was fairly common to have the conference, then receive the invitation three days later. If you wanted to download a file, ftp was likely to fail due to ISDN congestion that you would be forced to use a uuencode-by-email service. You E-mailed a message with the ftp path you wanted to download to the server, then it would download the file, chop it up and uuencode it back to you in lots of little pieces.
Otherwise, home users had the choice of a 14.4 kilobaud modem - some ISP's like Demon Internet built their own DOS window based application to manage E-mail/USENET postings. You could download the headers first, then pick out which full postings you wanted to download. Even then with a PC, you were still cramped for space with 40/80 Megabyte hard disk drives. One high resolution image from SGI could take up more disk space than you had on your PC.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
Ubiquity, a feature of the internet, was a consequence of multimedia, a feature of the web -- almost anyone could get access to the internet for many years before the web was popular (I remember first looking into local ISP options in ~1991.) Comaparatively few people did until the web was popular because there was no appeal to most people. The internet, which had been around for quite sometime, became omnipresent because it offered something which rapidly drew wide interest, and that was the multimedia offered by the the web.
Have you visited MySpace? Not only do things ripple, spin, and dance, they glitter, shimmer, and reflect. Nothing's changed, it just reaches new depths of tastelessness. In general, personal web pages are as bad as they've always been, except now there's CMS/blog/social-whateverthefuck sites to make it oh so much easier.
Badgerbadgerbadger.com is not connected with the creator of the flash movie, it is just some guy trying to profiteer over the meme. Stick with linking to the original authors, not the leeches.
I did a quick search for the badger flash vid before posting, and just took the first link I could find. I thought that was the original site at first. I hadn't seen the flash video in years so I didn't know the original URL.
The original is Here
I see no reason why it should take less in normal HTML. Any explanations why you think so?
You're reading it wrong. GP said:
There's no reason whatsoever that it should use more bandwidth to send an email (once the system has loaded) via that interface than through the simple HTML view; in fact, it should take less.
Therefore, you are making the same argument as the GP, but with less reading comprehension.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
Badgerbadgerbadger.com is not connected with the creator of the flash movie, it is just some guy trying to profiteer over the meme. Stick with linking to the original authors, not the leeches.
Except that badgerbadgerbadger.com's little flash movie has a link in the bottom right-hand corner of it, pointing to www.weebls-stuff.com - the aforementioned original author.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
I would also point out a famous quote of Newton in this context: "If I have seen further it is only by standing on the shoulders of Giants."
The history of mathematics is actually full of examples of parallel discoveries and rediscoveries. Mathematics is not the only science in which this happens of course, for example physics is full of independent rediscoveries as well.
But whereas in physics one could argue that the common laws of the universe make independent rediscoveries inevitable, there is no such argument with mathematics. The independent rediscoveries there can only be explained by a certain amount of interchangeability at the level of the human mind.
No, not little, brown, furry rodents...
Massive, golden, beautiful beasts!!
As most of you know (or maybe don't know), it's called gopher because it was developed at the University of Minnesota... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_(protocol)
Oh my children, though art forgetting the most insidious of all the evils of the time: The damned animated cursors. How can one forget how every DAMNED SINGLE WEBSITE seemed to turn your damned cursor into some horrible fairy looking monstrosity that drug crap behind it like a 78 Pinto and half the time would either slow you machine to a crawl, or sometimes, just for fun, crash the whole damned thing!
There was the whole "sparks from a comet trail" crap, the whole "Your cursor shooting fire" crap, oh and the really bloated "Your cursor is chained to a damned pocketwatch" crap. And I am sure that many can fill in even more evil ones. And then of course some truly vicious bastards decided to make it easy for every moron to turn your cursor into crap and Comet Cursors was born. The most horrible invention of the late 90s IMHO. You wanted to instantly crank the bad taste to 11 while giving your visitors a truly fugly experience? let Comet Cursors make their surfing the ubersuck!
Believe me, as much as I hate all the "Web 2.0" overdone Ajax and Flash laden crap, it has nothing on the evils of the custom cursors fad. At least i can easily block flash and bury scripts behind Noscript. With those damned cursors on the machines of the time it might take you five minutes just to reach the close button if they had the effects cranked up! As someone who lived through it I will take bloated Flash and Ajax crap ANY day over the damned cursors. They were simply TOO evil.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
I understand your complaint. But to give rendering engine developers some credit, if you really understood the complexities of rendering html properly, you'd understand why they stopped trying to do partial rendering a long time ago, its just not worth the effort at this point.
No, you DON'T understand my complaint. Firefox will have rendered the page, right? Then a SINGLE PAGE ELEMENT fails to load, or perhaps the site fails to close the TCP connection properly, and now Firefox says "The connection was reset while the page was loading" and the page I was just successfully reading disappears.
If you read and understood my comment this time, now you understand my complaint.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Only if you wanted to use their code. It was very easy to write a simple Gopher server. Not saying that NCSA making their http server code freely available didn't help in the adoption of http/html, it certainly was a strong factor, but the U of M gopher server wasn't the only one out there.