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:lol whut?

[Hork_Monkey]

You didn't have a 10mb hard drive for your C64, unless you were from the future.

Re:I loved Gopher

[inode_buddha]

If you need decent iPhone entertainment, you could always try this

Re:lol whut?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's what happens on a Friday night when angry nerds with no dates get lubed from their mommies' wine coolers, with their left hands on their crotches, and TROLL SLASHOT while listening to their ALL-RUSH MIXTAPES.

Also, here's the five donts of interracial dating:

• Never start a conversation with "Why do you people?" No matter how well intentioned the question, it will appear raciss 'n' shit and cause your date to chimp-out.
• Leave religious and political topics alone. Knowing where someone stands on the issues is important, but nobody gives a fuck about Black Jesus or the Armenian genocide.
• Don't make assumptions. Wait until they behave like monkeys before your racial stereotypes are fulfilled; learn to see your date as an animal as well as an individual.
• Never treat your date like a flavor of the week, especially since all non-white minorities taste equally nasty, but with small variations. Asians taste like kim chee, Hispanic vaginas taste like vinegar and onion, while Black vaginas taste like jenkem.
• Never treat your date like an escort. A man I met online once asked me to come to the back door of his home so no one would know he was dating a black girl. I told him, "look, bitch-ass nigga, it's nighttime and ain't nobody gon's see mee!"