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.

Comments

Re:I loved Gopher

[Dwedit]

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.

Re:lol whut?

[mikael]

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.