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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.
'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.