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 Gopher well. It was the early nineties and I would peruse computer networking and programming topics but I also stumbled upon so many Dungeons and Dragons resources in my Gophering. I don't know if the age of the memory is tainted somehow but it seemed like Dungeons and Dragons players were big early adopters of the technology. I am interested in what other people found on Gopher. Maybe it will help me put my own experience with it in perspective.
The Internet was ours then, or at least it was the playground where we were top dog. Then clever nerds and businessmen ran with it and made billions, while ordinary people flocked to discover this new thing. That playground has grown to encompass the entire world, but our role in it hasn't grown with it, and we became largely irrelevant. The days of pioneering are over, it isn't ours anymore, and that's made some of us bitter. But I wouldn't call the old Internet better
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
It's true. I even remember Nicholas Negroponte, at a CHI conference in the late 1980s, giving a talk about the future of high-speed network connections to the home -- he mentioned that fiber could gives speeds of more than a Gb/s, and went on to make the case (with a completely straight face) that no individual could ever use that much bandwidth.
I suppose I can't give myself too much credit for laughing at the time -- I was thinking of the bandwidth necessary to ship high-resolution images at video framerates, without giving a thought to compression. But even that long ago, I knew that anybody saying "we'll never need more than X" of a computational resource was setting himself up to look very silly in the future.
It's just a shame that so much of the demand for bandwidth (and computational power) is driven by the videos and ads we don't want.