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

You kids and your fancy gopher

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm pressing ESC twice to access this damn BBS.

And More Laws will destroy it

[relikx]

or try their hardest at least.

Uh, no.

[AKAImBatman]

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.

Re:Uh, no.

[drinkypoo]

The thing about the PITA of HTML is that it forced people to redo so much of their content into a uniform format, what's more a format that could be spidered by robots. That's the secret sauce. Yeah it's nice that people can follow hyperlinks, but the ability deal with basically one kind of data (marked up docs with hyperlinks in them) that really made the web powerful.

The thing about HTML is that it really didn't force anyone to do anything. A web server will serve plain text files just fine and so long as everyone's MIME types are good, your browser will display them. Another non-secret secret of the web is that it doesn't require a HTTP server. You can serve a web site just fine (albeit a little slowly and without dynamic content) via FTP. Finally, I took a bunch of drinking game content and put up a drinking game website by just writing a CGI (this was back in the early nineties) to write a header, insert a PRE tag, include the text file, insert a closing PRE tag, and write a footer. Careful examination of this description will reveal that I did not actually have to do anything to my text files. In addition, text files can be spidered just fine. HTML renders down to text, when done correctly (or it doesn't spider) and text is already text.

Got any other erroneous information to share?

I loved Gopher

[alienunknown]

But I really prefer Badger over Gopher.

Thats what is really stopping me from getting an iPhone, because I can't access badger-net.

Re:lol whut?

[RDW]

'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.

Re:lol whut?

[mikael]

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.

Re:lol whut?

[MightyMartian]

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.

Re:Irritation

[Geezle2]

Newton/Leibniz and calculus is actually one of the very best arguments for why the individual is unimportant in the larger historical scheme of things. The same technological synchronicity can be seen in a number of inventions and developments, such as atomic energy/bombs, airplanes, telephone, computers, etc.

The thing is, when the precursors to a new technology get developed, the new technology becomes apparent to growing numbers of people until someone develops it.

I remember experimenting with GUIs in my local Atari Computer Club back in 1981 (using light pens instead of mice... light pens were easier to fabricate). People nowadays like to think that Bill Gates invented the Graphical User Interface. Slightly more savvy individuals think it was one of the Steves (Jobs/Woz) who did it. Marginally less clueless folks might think it was Xerox, or IBM or whoever. The fact is that as soon as cheap consumer-grade computers hit the market (mid-late 10970's), GUI controlled operating systems became inevitable. If there was a gang of people in my little backwater town working on the issue, there must have been thousands upon thousands of people experimenting with GUI controls nationwide.

Finally, compared to the technologies upon which it relies (with regards to the Internet), HTML, and, by extension the Web, is trivial. The ONLY important tag in HTML that matters is the link anchor, and this itself had precedents. How long would it have really taken for people to start including the gopher addresses of referenced documents in their documents that they posted on gopher? How long before gopher browsers were developed that could retrieve and display documents that were encoded in standard formats became available? Anyone who remembers using the gopher browser that shipped with early versions of OS/2 knows that gopher could have done the duty of http, given its absence... particularly as a standard document format would have eventually developed to ease spider indexing.

Really, folks, there were a lot of us working on this stuff back then. What we have now is a crude compromise (with Flash cancer), but that we would have a graphically navigable network of documents spanning the globe was never in doubt.