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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'm pressing ESC twice to access this damn BBS.
or try their hardest at least.
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.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
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.
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.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
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.
Oh, not the little, brown, furry rodents.
Thats what is really stopping me from getting an iPhone, because I can't access badger-net.
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.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
If you want to see an old style yet tasteful web page, visit my vintage 2000 Open Slate Project site. It features a "3D" background, another fad that faded. No Flash. I do need to spend more time updating that site.
Gary Dunn
Open Slate Project
"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.
Yes it was- people went nuts with images on their pages.
Oh, how history repeats itself: first they went nuts with images. Then it was animated images, and about the same time, flashing text. Then it was flash animations. Now, it's XML. Try using the complex gmail view in HTML mode sometime. There's no reason whatsoever that it should use more bandwidth to send an email (once the system has loaded) via that interface than through the simple HTML view; in fact, it should take less. Nope! It takes more.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Every time I have to sit through a bunch of crappy Flash or out of control javascript, I find myself wishing I could get a decent gopher feed.
'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.
Back in the mid-1990's, the most economical internet connection for small companies was a 64Kb ISDN link billed by the kilobyte, with a local university as the ISP. As most conference announcements were broadcast by USENET, the store-and-forward service was so slow, it was fairly common to have the conference, then receive the invitation three days later. If you wanted to download a file, ftp was likely to fail due to ISDN congestion that you would be forced to use a uuencode-by-email service. You E-mailed a message with the ftp path you wanted to download to the server, then it would download the file, chop it up and uuencode it back to you in lots of little pieces.
Otherwise, home users had the choice of a 14.4 kilobaud modem - some ISP's like Demon Internet built their own DOS window based application to manage E-mail/USENET postings. You could download the headers first, then pick out which full postings you wanted to download. Even then with a PC, you were still cramped for space with 40/80 Megabyte hard disk drives. One high resolution image from SGI could take up more disk space than you had on your PC.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
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?
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.'"
We only pray that whoever invented the tag was executed by firing squad.
You can't take the sky from me.
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.
Perhaps, you worthless piece of crap, you should have my post. But being that you're too fucking stupid to probably even breathe without your genetically-diseased mother popping her head through the day shouting "Asswipe, inhale!", I guess I can forgive you your cretinism and illiteracy.
But please, quit trying to hump your dog. She's a he, and has been dead for a couple of years. I know, with your puny mind, it's hard to fathom necrophilic bestiality being wrong, but somewhere in the slack-jawed, low-browed head of yours there must be some small glimmer of morality.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
They are.
I still browse with images turned off if I am on a slow GSM connection.
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?
Have you visited MySpace? Not only do things ripple, spin, and dance, they glitter, shimmer, and reflect. Nothing's changed, it just reaches new depths of tastelessness. In general, personal web pages are as bad as they've always been, except now there's CMS/blog/social-whateverthefuck sites to make it oh so much easier.
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.
You are welcome on my lawn.
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.
I see no reason why it should take less in normal HTML. Any explanations why you think so?
You're reading it wrong. GP said:
There's no reason whatsoever that it should use more bandwidth to send an email (once the system has loaded) via that interface than through the simple HTML view; in fact, it should take less.
Therefore, you are making the same argument as the GP, but with less reading comprehension.
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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).
Mike O'Donnell http://people.cs.uchicago.edu/~odonnell/
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.
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.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
No, not little, brown, furry rodents...
Massive, golden, beautiful beasts!!
As most of you know (or maybe don't know), it's called gopher because it was developed at the University of Minnesota... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_(protocol)
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.
Buy Text Processing in Python
"My geek imagination is now all atwitter imagining an alternate gopher-driven universe."
It looks a lot like this one except everyone has a pointy goatee, including the gopher-driven internet.
Insert witty sig here.
Oh my children, though art forgetting the most insidious of all the evils of the time: The damned animated cursors. How can one forget how every DAMNED SINGLE WEBSITE seemed to turn your damned cursor into some horrible fairy looking monstrosity that drug crap behind it like a 78 Pinto and half the time would either slow you machine to a crawl, or sometimes, just for fun, crash the whole damned thing!
There was the whole "sparks from a comet trail" crap, the whole "Your cursor shooting fire" crap, oh and the really bloated "Your cursor is chained to a damned pocketwatch" crap. And I am sure that many can fill in even more evil ones. And then of course some truly vicious bastards decided to make it easy for every moron to turn your cursor into crap and Comet Cursors was born. The most horrible invention of the late 90s IMHO. You wanted to instantly crank the bad taste to 11 while giving your visitors a truly fugly experience? let Comet Cursors make their surfing the ubersuck!
Believe me, as much as I hate all the "Web 2.0" overdone Ajax and Flash laden crap, it has nothing on the evils of the custom cursors fad. At least i can easily block flash and bury scripts behind Noscript. With those damned cursors on the machines of the time it might take you five minutes just to reach the close button if they had the effects cranked up! As someone who lived through it I will take bloated Flash and Ajax crap ANY day over the damned cursors. They were simply TOO evil.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
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.
No, you DON'T understand my complaint. Firefox will have rendered the page, right? Then a SINGLE PAGE ELEMENT fails to load, or perhaps the site fails to close the TCP connection properly, and now Firefox says "The connection was reset while the page was loading" and the page I was just successfully reading disappears.
If you read and understood my comment this time, now you understand my complaint.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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
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!
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.