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.
If Gopher had won we would have had more a focus on content than presentation. I hardly think this is a bad thing.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
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.
Wasn't it really at heart a search engine? In a Gopher world there would be no Google. And it sounds like what it does 'go-fer' instead of a marketing name.
Fifty years of Yippie! 1968-2018
Hate to break it to you, but you're not special. Neither is Person X.
That is a crock of shit. I mean, I may not be special, but certain persons who helped shape the future of science (including computing) are. There is no denying the "specialness" of people like Nikola Tesla or Albert Einstein. Why, then, should you deny the specialness of someone who is arguably less special than they are, but more special than you are? Simple jealousy? 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. Maybe Tim Berners-Lee is no Einstein or Newton or Tesla, but he is certainly an individual with unique thought and influence.
In any case, the argument here is actually that if we didn't have the processing power to do multimedia, that we would have had a dramatic population increase in gopherspace rather than exponential growth of the WWW. The only part of the argument that is stupid is that people were already serving images over gopher; you needed an external viewer, of course. But sooner or later, someone would have come up with a multimedia markup extension for gopher, and then gopher would have been the WWW, just with a different protocol.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
'I even remember one early commentator saying that text-only web pages were actually *better* for people on 14.4k baud modems.'
As I recall (Get Off My Lawn, etc.) if you were on a slow connection the web pretty much became a text-only medium initially. I used Lynx rather a lot back then (for speed), while Mosaic tended to be a rather frustrating experience. One of the cool new features that got everyone excited about one of the early versions of Netscape was its ability to show you the text (and of course active clickable links to other pages) without having to wait for every single image on the page to load (assuming you had image loading turned on at all). Suddenly the web started to look like a useable medium rather than an over-ambitious experiment crippled by slow networks and unresponsive software.
the only difference users would see would be that the text of a page would load first and URLS would all start with gopher://
The only reason the text of a page doesn't load first today is that web browsers are badly behaved. Firefox will often refuse to render a page until it gets all the content. That's not the most aggravating thing about it though; if a connection is reset, then Firefox now shows you a page saying that it was reset, instead of the page content that it DID successfully manage to download. I don't know who's responsible for this "feature" but it's fucking stupid. It made the web mostly unusable when I was on a modem, because I'd be happily reading a page, some ad would fail to load, and then Firefox tells me the page failed to load. Whoever made that decision should definitely be asked to justify it, or asked to fuck off immediately.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
after seeing it on a secretary's desktop at NASA in the early 90s. My comment was very close to "Yeah, but I can already get all that with gopher; I don't think it will take off." Now, in my defense, just six months later I predicted that in a few years you would see panel trucks with web addresses instead of 800 numbers. The couple of people I told that to looked at my like _I_ was crazy. Damn, I wish I would have put my retirement savings behind that thought.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
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.
Not at all. Email was the killer app. And that wasn't multi-media.
I remember trying to get an Internet connection in '91. It wasn't to be had where I was. I had to "borrow" a link from the local university. I got involved with an outfit opening up an ISP in the area. And while firing up Netscape got folks really happy, it was email that got the subscription. Folks wanted to be able to email their kids off at college. We were in a military town with a base who was on a constant deployment schedule (myself included). Military families bought subscriptions as soon as they realized email was (almost) instant compared to the 2 weeks it took for snail-mail to make it across the pond and into sandland.
Now, to be sure, for me... the 'web was a killer app as well. I remember being all giddy over clicking a link that had a .au in it's URL (and not paying LD charges). This was the realization of Clarcke's 2010. And then I was pulling up images of all matter of content - from magazines to hobbies to... well.. other interests.
But all of this would be window dressing if it wasn't for the fact that I can email anyone no matter what service provider they use. And when I want to bring up Megacorp Hobby's web page to order supplies to do a project I read about on some enthusiast's private underwater basket weaving fan site... I don't have to worry about the provider then either.
The underpinnings to this all is ubiquity. I had a lot of these features during the years I used CompuServe, et. al. And services like Sierra Network were pushing the graphics / multi-media angle. But none of them hooked me up with a fan site in Australia.
The uudecode by email services were useful when my company had a UUCP connection via a nearby City Council (which was the only provider offering such a service to businesses at the time). We didn't have enough bandwidth for the binary newsgroups (9600 modem, IIRC), so that was the only way to get files without waiting for them to be shipped on CDROM so we could go to the one machine that had a CDROM reader and copy them off. ISDN wasn't available at our exchange so our first permanent connection was a 9600 leased line to the local University. At that point, direct ftp became a more attractive option than uudecode - which often took days due to throttling by the ftp-by-mail systems to control load, and we quickly learnt about the ftp reget and passive transfers to local servers to save international bandwidth costs (we were billed $4/MB for international traffic, but local traffic was free).
One of the things I downloaded was a graphical gopher program for OS/2. That was great - much better interface than FTP, even than the graphical FTP clients that had started to appear by then, it supported linking to images and binaries, but without support for ftp's reget, I didn't see the use for anything other than text. One of my co-workers showed me this great new program he'd downloaded for the FreeBSD box that was serving as our internet gateway - lynx. Comparing it to the graphical gopher, I found it unusable - links were scattered throughout the text instead of in a nice menu at the end like gopher, and predicted that this new http protocol would quietly die out along with other little known new protocols of the time. A few months later, someone downloaded a beta version of Mosaic. Now the web started to look worthwhile, and within weeks myself and co-worker who had introduced me to lynx came in on the weekend to replace the FreeBSD box with a new 486 running Slackware and a CERN webserver.
And yet Leibniz invented calculus too, independently and at about the same time. Methinks you need a better example.
Or you need to learn about Newton's theory of gravitation, which fits the GP's point much better:
"He saw things in a way that others did not, and he advanced science dramatically."
Calculus is math, which is admittedly a large part of science... but I believe the GP's point was that figuring out that things fall down because "down" is relative to the large, relatively stationary object we stand on was probably completely inconsistent with the then-current accepted "truths". Think different, ya dig?
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
It's surprising that no one here on slashdot has pointed out that a major difference between the html and gopher was that gopher services had to get a licence from the University of Minnesota while http servers could be constructed without a licence.
Free open software with free open standards is what got the web going.
Gopher was doomed indirectly by Moore's Law, but what killed Gopher was LICENSING.
While processor speed was doubling, MODEM speed was not increasing as rapidly. In fact, acoustic modem speed in commercial devices has since peaked and is not perceptibly increasing.
Gopher existed during a brief period when the modem speeds were climbing from 2400 baud to 19,200. At these speeds, even small image transfers (then GIF and the earliest JPGs) took several seconds. The average Gopher page, at about 1,500 bytes, could load "instantly" at 2400 baud. The average web page, at 15,000 bytes, took several seconds at 2400 baud.
Even at 19,200, large (150K) images took several seconds to load. This delay, while tolerable, discouraged web pages that auto-loaded more than one or two images.
Only when modem speeds increased to 56K did a page loaded with a modest amount of graphics download at an acceptable pace.
Gopher was designed as a campus-wide information system, and only became an Internet phenomenon when University of Minnesota politics drove its development onto the Internet. After three years of design, the U of MN CWIS committee had a foot-thick set of requirements and specifications, with out one page of code. Exasperated with this process, Mark McCahill, Paul Lindner, and Farhad Anklesaria produced a working CWIS prototype, Gopher, between the April and May meetings of the CWIS committee, and demonstrated it at the next meeting. The committee, predictably, had a conniption and further development of Gopher was prohibited. Mark put Gopher up on an FTP site and colleagues at other institutions were invited to continue development, and it took off from there. So Gopher was never intended as a world-wide Internet protocol.
While Gopher was effective at presenting the Internet as a file structure, the Web was always going to be more popular since it presents the Internet like a magazine. The limiting factor was the bandwidth necessary to communicate the images (and other media).
But what killed Gopher was licensing. Just as Gopher was never designed as anything more than a campus-wide information system to help students and faculty connect with campus resources or register for class, so was Gopher programming never intended to become the full-time occupation of the developers. All of us had numerous other responsibilities, not the least of which was walk-in and telephone computer consulting for the 100,000-person U of Mn campuses. While the U of Mn was quite happy to accept the praise and publicity that came from Internet Gopher, no funds were ever actually directed to the project.
In an effort to make it possible for Gopher to be supported full time, a radical new idea was floated. What if we LICENSED the SOFTWARE? For... MONEY?
If this seems conventional to you, now, it certainly was not, then. Back in 1993, most Internet domain names ended in .edu or .mil. A TLD of ".com" was considered crass and improper, I kid you not.
The ruling philosophy was "The Internet is a public medium build by colleges and the military for the use of the public, and using it for profit is crass commercialism." I know, a lot has changed, eh?
So when the Gopher team suggested that institutions PAY for the privilege of using Gopher, Gopher servers vanished overnight. Just the suggestion that money be involved offended some system administrators sensibilites enough to make them drop it; others feared that lawsuits were imminent.
Meanwhile, at just that time, modem speeds increased to 56K, and a brand new FREE, unlicensed server called a WEB server was arriving on the scene. And of course it could show pretty pictures etc. etc. Without funds to allocate the Gopher team's resources full-time, our other duties took us away from Gopher support just as the Web was taking off. The spotlight moved on from Gopher, for multiple reasons, but it moved because of money.
The one place where Gopher SHOULD have been revived, but was not, was on cell phone
Bob Alberti, CISSP, Internet Gopher, RFC 1436. Writer of early MUD, Scepter of Goth, 1983. http://tinyurl.com/Mitlanyal