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

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.