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?

Comments

1995

[vikingpower]

My first steps on the internet were divided between pages with hyperlinks, i.e. the internet as it is - more or less - nowadays, and gopher pages. Interestingly, I always failed to get the point of gopher, where "classical" hyperlinked pages made immediate sense to me. Same thing as with TCP/IP vs Token Ring: I instantaneously "got" TCP/IP, and only much later understood the point of Token Ring. So then - gopher: good riddance ? I guess so, yes. Along with set-top boxes, netscape, Flash, and VB script.

Re: 1995

[Anonymous Coward]

You keep comparing TCP/IP and Token Ring when they are different layers in the stack. Maybe you mean Ethernet rather than TCP/IP?

Re:1995

[johnw]

The point of Token Ring was to have plugs and sockets where it was impossible to put the plug in the wrong way around - or the right way around.

And indeed, you could simply plug two plugs together.

I used to do quite a few joint pitches with IBM sales-folk back then, and it was amusing to watch the show as they addressed the question of which networking hardware to go for. The plot was always the same. At early meetings they would say, "IBM sells both Ethernet and Token Ring and we recommend whichever is most appropriate for each customer. We'll need to learn more about your particular requirements before we can say which one is more suitable for you." Then, several meetings later when lots of things had been discussed, but nothing really relevant to the networking hardware the message would become, "Now we've had a chance to assess your particular requirements, we can say that for your particular case Token Ring would be better." It was always Token Ring, and never any explanation as to why.

The real point of Token Ring was that IBM owned it and they didn't own Ethernet. It set out to solve a problem which didn't exist if you designed your network properly in the first place (overloaded Ethernet provides poor service to everyone) and introduced far more of its own. Like so many IBM technologies, it was a mess. Don't get me started on APPC.

Re:1995

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

less free-form.

www was not intrinsically better than gopher. It won out because there was more free porn accessible with it.

sigh

[phantomfive]

the internet was not yet open for business. It had been built on dot-mil and dot-edu, on public funds. Programmers shared source code; if you needed something, someone gave it to you. A dot-com address was considered crass.

The internet was better then.

Re: sigh

[brasselv]

I enjoy the spirit of your post, but I would disagree that the days of 'pioneering' are over .
from a broader historical perspective, the internet is still very young, there is still an enormous amount of stuff to be invented and figured out around it, we are still grappling to fully understand what it means to humanity, and from a business perspective its still a place where clever guys with some ideas and good luck can go from zero to a billion in a couple of years - which isn't the case in the steel industry.
its still quite pioneers time to me.