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

What is the World Wide Web?

[Caboosian]

I've wondered this often, and often looked up articles about it. However, I'm still stumped. Yes, I understand that it is a "network of networks" - but how does it work? What the hell is a DNS server? I get how my home network works (vaguely) - IP addresses/subnets are assigned, and the computers communicate with the router and vice versa. However, once you extrapolate this to the web, I'm lost. Could a helpful slashdotter please give some sort of explanation? The Wikipedia article is kind of over my head in some spots, and completely unhelpful in others. It'd be real helpful to read an explanation from a real person.

Re:I loved Gopher

[inode_buddha]

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