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

Uh, no.

[AKAImBatman]

Even if the Web had been stunted by throttling, the demand for multimedia content would have eventually driven the rise of the Web or at least a super-Gopher.

Re:Uh, no.

[hey!]

Well, multimedia is a orthogonal concern, really. If anything, in the early days gopher was more convenient for multimedia than the web.

The thing about the web, the defining characteristic from the point of view of providers of information, was HTML. And HTML was a pain. It still is but since we assume it's necessary we don't think of it as pain. Back in the day, it was much easier dump all your stuff into gopher, including your multimedia files, than it was to write a whole new bunch of HTML from scratch.

HTML was pretty far from what people eventually wanted the web to do too, which was to be an app platform. A lot of fancy architectin' has gone on to get it where it is today, and people are still screwing around with stuff like flash.

The thing about the PITA of HTML is that it forced people to redo so much of their content into a uniform format, what's more a format that could be spidered by robots. That's the secret sauce. Yeah it's nice that people can follow hyperlinks, but the ability deal with basically one kind of data (marked up docs with hyperlinks in them) that really made the web powerful.

Another thing was that while the early HTML wasn't very much like what people wanted for their documents, and despite abortive early attempts to add things like fonts (not to mention our beloved blink tag), HTML's SGML roots gave it architectural flexibilty. It needed the flexibilty so that the the missing 99% of what really people wanted could be added later without turning it into a hopeless mess.

Re:Uh, no.

[drinkypoo]

The thing about the PITA of HTML is that it forced people to redo so much of their content into a uniform format, what's more a format that could be spidered by robots. That's the secret sauce. Yeah it's nice that people can follow hyperlinks, but the ability deal with basically one kind of data (marked up docs with hyperlinks in them) that really made the web powerful.

The thing about HTML is that it really didn't force anyone to do anything. A web server will serve plain text files just fine and so long as everyone's MIME types are good, your browser will display them. Another non-secret secret of the web is that it doesn't require a HTTP server. You can serve a web site just fine (albeit a little slowly and without dynamic content) via FTP. Finally, I took a bunch of drinking game content and put up a drinking game website by just writing a CGI (this was back in the early nineties) to write a header, insert a PRE tag, include the text file, insert a closing PRE tag, and write a footer. Careful examination of this description will reveal that I did not actually have to do anything to my text files. In addition, text files can be spidered just fine. HTML renders down to text, when done correctly (or it doesn't spider) and text is already text.

Got any other erroneous information to share?

Re:Uh, no.

[jedidiah]

> This is the same sense in which 'apt-get' is a convenient way to get software.

Compared to hunting down something and then dealing with the crap and ads that
are likely to infest any Windows download sit, "apt-get" is HIGHLY convenient.

"get me some program" and letting "get me some" sort out all of the relevant
details is a big improvement over how most people install these software these
days.

"modern software" that needs to be installed by a shiny happy GUI installer
is actually a step backwards in many respects from something that you could
just download, unarc and run.

Conflating a proper package manager with a source tarball and any manner of
other absurdly more difficult things is just assinine.

A least Gopher didn't try to force you to stream everything.

Multimedia was inevitable

[bonch]

Even if Gopher had dominated due to filtering (a premise I don't agree with), multimedia capabilities would have eventually been added to the protocol out of demand. We'd have the same web we have today.

Re:Multimedia was inevitable

[_Sprocket_]

Eventually, maybe, but exposure drives demand; if it had stalled long-enough for, say, cable and phone companies to deliver substantial non-free interactive multimedia outside of the context of the web first, its very likely that nothing socially like the current web would have existed any time near now, even if many of the individual features that are important about the web were available in one form or another on some networked electonic system that was widely available elsewhere.

You have plenty proprietary network examples; CompuServe, GEnie, Prodigy, Sierra Network, AOL. Some are certainly more multi-media than others. But the common issue is that they were all their own digital islands. That worked well for decades. Until the Internet consumed public consciousness (and AOL launched the September that never ended).

The power of the 'web isn't in multi-media delivery. That's not to say it isn't important. But there is a more fundimental feature; ubiquity. For all the features the previous online services provided, they stopped as soon as you wanted to talk to someone who wasn't in that service.

This is further defined by the true killer application of the Internet; email. Email was almost exclusively text at that point (and already popular within the aforementioned online services). It largely remains about text today (despite occasional HTML-and-image laden "special messages" from various commercial entities).

Re:Multimedia was inevitable

[gad_zuki!]

Probably. We already had things like compuserv, prodigy, BBS, fidonet, email, minitel, etc but it wasnt until Joe Sixpack could see photos, play music, and click with a mouse did it take off in the market. The command line, memorizing keyboards, etc is a real barrier to entry. A lot of FOSS people dont understand that.

Its equally, if not more likely, that someone would have just invented something web-like and leapfrogged over gopher like TBL did at CERN.

Not to mention PCs having multimedia capabilities was a novel idea at the time. Things like speakers, music & movie clips on the PC, and CD-ROMs were seen as revolutionary. They were already sick of text only interfaces and HTTP gave them what they wanted. Gopher never really had a chance.

Re:lol whut?

[Marxist Hacker 42]

Yes it was- people went nuts with images on their pages. I even remember one early commentator saying that text-only web pages were actually *better* for people on 14.4k baud modems.

Irritation

[girlintraining]

People think that if Person X hadn't been around we might not have Technology Y. Okay, this is based on the idea that somehow Person X has some unique ability and only Person X can create Technology Y. Hate to break it to you, but you're not special. Neither is Person X. Second, the reason we have Technology Y is because we needed it. If those needs haven't gone away, then the pressure to fill that void remains -- and somebody else will come along and fill it eventually. Now you're right that maybe Betamax might have beaten VHS if not for a disturbance in the force, or it would have been HD-DVD instead of Bluray, or whatever... But we'd still have high density optical media. Gopher would have died simply because it didn't meet the needs of the population. Maybe it wouldn't be HTTP that replaced it five, or ten years later, but something like it would have been created.

Re:Irritation

[mrchaotica]

History is chock-full of examples of people whose unique way of thinking changed the shape of our world, the canonical example being Newton. He saw things in a way that others did not, and he advanced science dramatically.

And yet Leibniz invented calculus too, independently and at about the same time. Methinks you need a better example.

Re:Irritation

[DragonWriter]

Success depends on a lot more than just a person's innate "specialness".

Sure, so what? That it depends on more than a person's "specialness" does not refute that "specialness" matters.

Or I can be more blunt: They just happened to be in the right place, at the right time, and had what was needed.

Yes, and to be equally blunt, hundreds of millions or billions of other people were around at the right time, very many of them at the same right place or one equally right; what was key is the "had what was needed" parted.

Sure, without any one of a small number of people, nuclear weapons would still have been developed, just later and perhaps by a different country. The effect on world history would, potentially, have been pretty significant.

More to the point at hand, had the preferences of gopher-preferring administrators prevailed in the early 1990s, we still eventually would probably have multimedia over popular network systems -- but with the internet already going through a slow growth before the explosion due to the web, it might have been after big firms got farther ahead of the ball, and missed much of the disruptive impact that the explosion of the internet that occurred because of the utility of the web had.

Re:Irritation

[Geezle2]

Newton/Leibniz and calculus is actually one of the very best arguments for why the individual is unimportant in the larger historical scheme of things. The same technological synchronicity can be seen in a number of inventions and developments, such as atomic energy/bombs, airplanes, telephone, computers, etc.

The thing is, when the precursors to a new technology get developed, the new technology becomes apparent to growing numbers of people until someone develops it.

I remember experimenting with GUIs in my local Atari Computer Club back in 1981 (using light pens instead of mice... light pens were easier to fabricate). People nowadays like to think that Bill Gates invented the Graphical User Interface. Slightly more savvy individuals think it was one of the Steves (Jobs/Woz) who did it. Marginally less clueless folks might think it was Xerox, or IBM or whoever. The fact is that as soon as cheap consumer-grade computers hit the market (mid-late 10970's), GUI controlled operating systems became inevitable. If there was a gang of people in my little backwater town working on the issue, there must have been thousands upon thousands of people experimenting with GUI controls nationwide.

Finally, compared to the technologies upon which it relies (with regards to the Internet), HTML, and, by extension the Web, is trivial. The ONLY important tag in HTML that matters is the link anchor, and this itself had precedents. How long would it have really taken for people to start including the gopher addresses of referenced documents in their documents that they posted on gopher? How long before gopher browsers were developed that could retrieve and display documents that were encoded in standard formats became available? Anyone who remembers using the gopher browser that shipped with early versions of OS/2 knows that gopher could have done the duty of http, given its absence... particularly as a standard document format would have eventually developed to ease spider indexing.

Really, folks, there were a lot of us working on this stuff back then. What we have now is a crude compromise (with Flash cancer), but that we would have a graphically navigable network of documents spanning the globe was never in doubt.

Nothing has changed

[Anonymous Coward]

"In the early 1990s, the World Wide Web was a power-hungry monster unpopular with network administrators"

As I write this, Firefox is using 300mb of ram and 100% of one core, so not much has changed since then.

And now, imagine the Web without IE and Flash

[Anonymous Coward]

Imagine what the Web could be like today, if it had not been for Microsoft's anti-web-standards Internet Explorer and Macromedia's CPU-wasting Flash.

Re:Gopher was great

[hey!]

I'm not sure that's right.

The thing is, it's possible to architecturally separate presentation from content from metadata in HTML. Furthermore, people do care about presentation. Who are we to say they shouldn't? The problem is confusing the two.

Here's what I see wrong with the puritanical belief that outlawing presentation hanky-panky will keep the flock virtuously focused on content: people will cheat. When they think they can get away with it, they'll enthusiastically engage in all manner of abominations, like sticking their PowerPoints into gopher collections.

The miserable presentation capabilities of HTML actually did a lot more to promote the very idea that content was something independent from presentation and important in itself. After a bit of straying down the path of unnatural vice (font tags, tables for formatting etc), people discovered they could enjoy their presentation -- no more than that, they could enjoy a wide variety of presentations -- within the blessed institution of stylesheets.

Re:lol whut?

[CannonballHead]

Isn't there a reason, though? Presumably, using javascript/ajax, you don't need to send/receive as much information (i.e., reload the ENTIRE page) at a time. With plain HTML, you would have to receive a copy of the entire page again... ?

I see no reason why it should take less in normal HTML. Any explanations why you think so?

Re:I loved Gopher

[Anonymous Coward]

Stick with linking to the original authors, not the leeches.

What kind of dick says something like that but then doesn't provide the link?

Re:lol whut?

[aliquis]

Sounds good to me, gopher don't do flash, right?

Also with lower band-width requirements hosting would be cheaper so banners wouldn't have been a necessity to support the website.

Re:lol whut?

[jonbryce]

They are.

I still browse with images turned off if I am on a slow GSM connection.

Re:lol whut?

[PopeRatzo]

You got a way with words, MightyMartian. I'll give you that. Not many words, but the ones you have you use to great effect.

Actual experience with FTP vs. Gopher vs. WWW

[ODBOL]

I founded one of the early online journals before the invention of HTML/HTTP. It's the Chicago Journal of Theoretical Computer Science, providing articles in copy-edited LaTeX source, as well as precompiled PS and PDF.

At first, the journal served papers through anonymous FTP.

Then, I crafted a Gopher structure to make browsing easier.

As soon as HTML/HTTP came along, I created the HTML version of the journal. It was much more maintainable than the Gopher version, because the hyperlinks decoupled the document structure from the file-system tree structure just enough. In a few years, I stopped maintaining the Gopher version, because it required an order of magnitude more work than the HTML, and readers all preferred the HTML anyway.

Adding pictures and stuff is rather trivial for the data architecture, although demanding for the network implementation. With a more maintainable structure, Gopher would have added the extras. It was the Hyperlinks that made HTML work better.

HTML also has some serious maintenance problems, but they appear later when the archive gets large, and they can be addressed with things like PHP compiling and content management systems.

From another point of view: Gopher essentially made file trees visible over the network (which is what I thought I wanted at first). HTML/HTTP provides a crude network database model distributed over the network.

Future advances in data architecture (as opposed to the types of data within that architecture) will have to do with other database models, and with other sorts of commitments between distributed servers, and with looser coupling between data ownership and server ownership. E.g., a way to provide reasonable assurance of future access to a particular data item (access includes being able to find it, not just its existence), without depending on a particular server at a particular registered domain name (the Wayback machine ameliorates the problem, but doesn't solve it).

Re:it would be the same

[BitZtream]

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.

Can it be done? Of course, is it worth it? Meh, considering most of the Internet is pretty reliable, the amount of times partial rendering would help doesn't really justify diverting that effort from other more important aspects of rendering.

3rd grade misunderstanding of protocols

[Lulu of the Lotus-Ea]

The difference between HTTP and Gopher has NOTHING WHATSOEVER to do with ability to serve multimedia content, nor with bandwidth. HTTP, or really HTML, just allows more diverse linking patterns than Gopher's hierarchical format. But there's nothing non-graphical or content specific about gopher. I RAN graphical Gopher clients perfectly happily (well, including early Web browsers that supported that protocol.

Re:lol whut?

[hairyfeet]

Thanks, you reminded me of one of my personal "most hated" of the day: The damned butterfly. Anybody else remember that one? It would make butterfly wings on the sides of your cursor and have little fairy dust looking crap trail behind it when your damned CURSOR would "flap its wings"? Always seemed to run into that bastard on the Geocities and that other crap free hosting site that was big in the day....Angel something but the horror of trying to read text as my cursor crapped fairy dung behind my pointer trail has caused me to block it out. If ever there was a fad that deserved a horrible death(if only it would have died quicker!) it was the custom cursor fad!