Slashdot Mirror
The Rise and Fall of the Gopher Protocol (minnpost.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Tim Gihring at MinnPost talks to the creators of what was, briefly, the biggest thing in the internet, Gopher. Gopher, for those who don't know or have forgotten, was the original linked internet application, allowing you to change pages and servers easily, though a hierarchical menu system. It was quick, it was easy to use, and important for this day and age, it didn't have Flash.
The article remembers Tim Berners-Lee describing the idea of a worldwide web at a mid-March, 1992 meeting of the Internet Engineering Task Force, at a time when Gopher "was like the Web but more straightforward, and it was already working." Gopher became magnitudes more popular -- both MTV and the White House announced Gopher sites -- leading to GopherCons around the country. Just curious -- how many Slashdot readers today remember using Gopher?
The article remembers Tim Berners-Lee describing the idea of a worldwide web at a mid-March, 1992 meeting of the Internet Engineering Task Force, at a time when Gopher "was like the Web but more straightforward, and it was already working." Gopher became magnitudes more popular -- both MTV and the White House announced Gopher sites -- leading to GopherCons around the country. Just curious -- how many Slashdot readers today remember using Gopher?
I remember it, at 65, actually I remember huge batch only mainframes. On a more serious note, I have a lot of time for Gopher, Lynx and all the 'simpifiers', I'd prefer everyone to have knowledge and communication at a low bandwidth rather than adverts, emojiis (whatever they are) and pictures of cats. My vision, going forward is goodbye port 80 and port 443, let's start again.
On y va, qui mal y pense!
I didn't have general internet access yet, but one of the local BBSes had a gopher gateway. It seems like ASCII maps for AD&D2 was one of the things we downloaded.