
Where Have All the Gophers Gone? Why the Web Beat Gopher for Mindshare (2008) - vezzy-fnord
http://ils.unc.edu/callee/gopherpaper.htm
======
Falkon1313
Gopher was great. I remember telneting through university networks, exploring,
and by chance finding fascinating stuff; more than I could ever read.

But I think the author misses the real killer feature of the web. The
difference in hypertext models (external vs internal) is mentioned, but
glossed over. Gopher was stuck with hierarchical indexes. It suffered from all
of the limitations of hierarchy and had no way to acknowledge the relations
between things. And documents in Gopher were dead ends. The web's ability to
link from anywhere within any document to any other (and even locations within
it) is a huge differentiator.

That was critical - instead of a limited hierarchy leading you down to a dead-
end, you had an unlimited neverending web of related ideas. Imagine the C2
Wiki or Wikipedia in gopher format - all the same content but with no links.
It wouldn't have anywhere near as much value.

The simplicity, cleanliness, and order of Gopher has beauty, but the much
messier web has real-world value. The network effects of linking would
naturally cause it to grow exponentially faster.

~~~
twirlip
The organization of knowledge is an old problem. Trees and indices are very
handy ways to locate books, er, files. There were three things that killed
gopher: multimedia, licensing, and search.

Inline images really set a webpage apart from the typical wall of text common
at the time. University of Minnesota's licensing scheme made the web more
attractive.

But the killer app was the web search engine: first DEC's AltaVista and then
Google. Before web search engines, finding info you wanted on from a website
was terrible - unless the pages were modelled after the traditional trees and
indices. Links were fun (remember webrings?) but not nearly as useful for
finding information until Google figured out ranking pages by weighting links.

~~~
varjag
> There were three things that killed gopher: multimedia, licensing, and
> search.

Gopher was dead before the Web gained practical advantage in any of that.

In 1997 the bookstores were still selling compilations of "best links on the
Web". Gopher at that point was already an obscure historical remark.

------
IvyMike
~/public_html

NCSA httpd supported an option that allowed every user on a system to put html
documents in a specially named directory and have them instantly served up to
the world. User created content exploded--undergraduates (like me) were
instantly addicted.

I'm not even sure who came up with ~/public_html (Rob McCool or Ari Luotonen
are the primary suspects) but whoever it was will always be an undersung hero
of the web.

~~~
david-given
I remember when someone started running httpd on our university network, and
the universal reaction was 'seriously? It's reading stuff out of our private
home directories and broadcasting it to anyone who asks? WTF, get this thing
turned off immediately!'.

Different world.

~~~
lmm
\\*nix home dirs aren't really "private". They usually default to world-
readable, and in a university environment (at least one like mine) there was a
culture where people expected friends to look at them.

~~~
dspillett
_> world readable ... there was a culture where people expected friends to
look at them_

Same here. The default user home from /etc/skel (or some equivalent) had a
user-access-only area that we were told to put sensitive work (individually
marked projects where we were explicitly expected/told not to collaborate on)
and other such into. We could protect other directories a little more too if
needed, or even open up bits of that one to "group" or "other" (at our own
risk) and there were specific groups setup for explicitly collaborative
projects (these days I would do away with that and control such collaboration
through git or its ilk).

------
andrewstuart
One of my most magnificently grand stupid ideas was to create a strange
boondoggle thing that kind of reinvented Gopher combined with the web and
linked data.

The exciting action starts at 1:30 if you want to see the outcome of software
developed at great expense with really no useful purpose.

Ladies and gentlemen: "NeoGopher" (New Gopher)

Essentially it let you browse through linked lists. Each list item could link
on to another list or to a web page. Each list was created by about 15 lines
of JavaScript which could be loaded from any web server and the data came from
any HTTP web API.

(turn the sound down, the words serve only to confuse)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yuSDU0JiI2c](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yuSDU0JiI2c)

Ahhh... so many meaningless words in the demo. Even I, who designed it, found
it hard to explain what it was - today I would say "It's a linked list
browser.", which is what Gopher was.

Of all the stupid ideas I have had (there have been many), re-inventing Gopher
was probably the worst. What was I thinking?

------
Ologn
At the end of 1993, gopher was much more popular than the web, gopherspace was
bigger, had search engines like veronica and so forth. You would hear about
the web, and download lynx, and connect to a dull University of Kanas web
page, or perhaps CERN's web page. Gopher just had a lot more content, was
searchable with veronica, was more enjoyable to browse etc.

Some of this behind the scenes stuff mattered, like University of Minnesota's
announcement of licensing fees. But the release of the Netscape browser is
really what changed things for a lot of people, with its inline images, live
cameras like the Fishcam, and this sort of thing. Mosaic was a harbinger of
it, but the release of the initial Netscape browser in 1994 is what really set
things going, and then the release of Netscape 2 and then 3 in 1996. Then
Microsoft release of their then-primitive browser with Windows 95 helped as
well (as well as them including an IP stack in Windows 95 - Windows 3.1 needed
things like Trumpet Winsock).

------
tokenadult
From the article, "After its creation in 1991 at the University of Minnesota,
use of Gopher exploded."

I'm a Gopher. That is, I'm an alumnus of the University of Minnesota. My first
Internet account was based on my alumni relationship with the university,
which gave me access to their large dial-up modem pool, and a distribution of
a software suite called Minuet (Minnesota Internet Users Essential Tool).[1]
Minuet included FTP and other standard protocols, and also had a Gopher client
built-in (of course).

I used Minuet to browse around the Internet for a few months after getting my
account, and definitely used it at first to access Usenet newsgroups. On the
Usenet newsgroup about homeschooling, I noticed that one frequent poster had a
funny-looking string of symbols in his signature block, which I learned was
the URL for his website about homeschooling, which is still alive and well.[2]
So I downloaded a Web browser (finding advice about how to do that in one of
the first popular books on using the Internet, borrowed from my friendly
public library), which must have been an early version of Mosaic. Wow, wow,
and wow. The integrated images in HTML documents are what won me over to
preferring the Web to Gopherspace, as well as the nonhierarchical hypertext
links. Following the URLs given in the library to some early cool websites was
all I needed to get hooked. An early version of my own website about
homeschooling[3] was on the Web by a year later, and I had my own domain for
it a year or so after that. Now I live online, as you see here. Gopher got
some people started in reading reference documents online, and then Web
browsers finished that job and also got us talking in new discussion formats
that have largely supplanted Usenet.

[1]
[http://foldoc.org/Minnesota%20Internet%20Users%20Essential%2...](http://foldoc.org/Minnesota%20Internet%20Users%20Essential%20Tool)

[2] Jon's Homeschool Resources

[http://www.midnightbeach.com/hs/](http://www.midnightbeach.com/hs/)

[3] [http://learninfreedom.org/](http://learninfreedom.org/)

~~~
Razengan
> new discussion formats that have largely supplanted Usenet.

I still wish that message boards/forums had a standard format and protocol,
like email does, so that we could use any OS-native client apps to access
them, like we do for email.

Apparently Usenet was too limited to support modern "necessities" like
avatars, profiles, stickies, votes and polls, but surely they could be worked
in as extensions or even an entirely new standard?

~~~
icedchai
Me too. I remember the days when email and news went hand-in-hand, every ISP
had an NNTP server, and it was an expected part of Internet service.

I had a Usenet feed (UUCP over dialup) something around 1991 or '92\. It was
amazing at the time.

------
tilt_error
I used Gopher (and Archie) pre 1991, when I spent a year in the military.
During the spring of 1992, on a visit to my university, I saw an early version
of a web browser (Mosaic, if I'm not misremembering things) and was completely
blown away. I did like Gopher and used it a lot, but in my opinion it could
not compete with the new web browser.

I haven't really had that kind of experience after this. The web really was
the thing and it has completely changed how we learn and work.

------
wtbob
I think it wasn't just about mindshare. It's easy enough to emulate gopher
with a website: it's just a list of links: <ol> and <a> to the rescue.

I still remember the lab where someone first showed me Mosaic. I was familiar
with the Internet: FTP, Usenet, xtank, archie. I said, 'what's that?' He said,
'it's the World Wide Web!' I asked, 'what's _that_?' and he replied, 'it's
like the Internet, but even bigger!'

That was all it took.

------
shermozle
I still have a gopher server. gopher://simonrumble.com

~~~
shermozle
Works on IPv6 even!

------
bovermyer
What a long, strange trip it's been. I miss port 70.

------
thanatropism
There used to be an early version of this essay online -- not the one that
opens the still-copyrighted _A thousand plateaus_. But there's a video where
it's read to illustrative diagrams (an "illustrated audiobook"):

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0XYc2scuJrI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0XYc2scuJrI)

I'm talking, of course, about rhizomes.

------
ksherlock
A few years ago, I needed an automated way to pull files into an Apple IIgs
(well, emulated Apple IIgs), which has a TCP stack but not much in the way of
TCP applications. So I wrote a gopher client. And server, for the host
computer. Around the turn of the century, I (ab)used the finger protocol to
copy files, so gopher was a step up in that regard.

------
lurkinggrue
There are some archives of gophers that can be had in torrent form. Amazing
stuff in there.

------
mhd
I do wonder how "Gopher5" would look like.

