
Where Have all the Gophers Gone? Why the Web beat Gopher (1999) - alokrai
https://ils.unc.edu/callee/gopherpaper.htm
======
IvyMike
The NCSA and Cern web servers had the ability to let users on a system publish
content from a specially named "~/public_html" directory. At UIUC, the
engineering labs quietly enabled this functionality for all engineering
students.

Within a week, dozens of students had their own web pages up, and by the end
of the year, hundreds did. Encouraged by their initial success, this
encouraged students to stand up their own web servers so they could run cgi
scripts, etc.

As far as I knew, there was no equivalent taste-test for providers of Gopher
content. You either stood up your own server or got special access to someone
else's server, both of which were hard to do at the time.

~~~
RHSeeger
RPI had this, too, and I remember taking full advantage of it oh so long ago.

~~~
hnzix
In the late 90s Oz universities generally gave their students email via Pine
plus a 10mb web folder as standard. Many STEM students made random websites
about their hobbies or poetry or whatever. It was like a proto Geocities.

~~~
throwphoton
And once you did that, your content was on the "World Wide Web", not just some
"Gopher server". The WWW name made the venue sound more intriguing.

------
dwheeler
The primary gopher killer was around February 1993 the University of Minnesota
announced that it would charge licensing fees for the use of its
implementation of the Gopher server. In contrast, CERN said anyone could
implement the WWW. Practically all implementation work from then on used the
WWW. In addition, the gopher developers wouldn't work (basically) with open
standards groups like the IETF.

By trying to control & license everything, they lost everything.

~~~
Polylactic_acid
I wonder what will happen to the next gen of video codecs. The proprietary
video codec is on the verge of collapse with most new devices now shipping AV1
decoders and streaming services looking at switching to AV1 when available.

~~~
gfxgirl
Has apple accounted AV1 support in MacOS and iOS? (sorry if I missed it. That
would be great news)

~~~
Polylactic_acid
They are in the group behind AV1 but they have yet to support it. VLC on iOS
can play it however so maybe streaming apps could include their own decoders
while waiting for apple. It looks like netflix is using AV1 for android users
right now and TVs are coming with AV1 support now.

------
cxvxx
There is a sort of Gopher "successor" in the works called Gemini that was
featured recently:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23042424](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23042424)

It aims to fix flaws in the Gopher protocol while still making it easy to
implement clients.

If you haven't dug into Gopher, there's lots of cool stuff in it from ASCII
art and old computer manuals to games and lots of blogs (called "phlogs"). I
suggest grabbing a client and heading to the Gopher Lawn to get a taste:

gopher://bitreich.org/1/lawn

(Lynx works as a client, but there are a ton more out there with fun UIs.)

~~~
Karrot_Kream
I wrote a 15 line Python server behind STunnel and xinetd for Gemini; I love
the protocol, and where I felt a lot of the Gopher world seemed to venerate
the old, I think Gemini really is a great, low-fat, content oriented protocol
and community. Come join the fun!

If you want to connect now: Web Portal:
[https://portal.mozz.us/gemini/gemini.circumlunar.space/](https://portal.mozz.us/gemini/gemini.circumlunar.space/)
Clients:
[https://portal.mozz.us/gemini/gemini.circumlunar.space/softw...](https://portal.mozz.us/gemini/gemini.circumlunar.space/software/)

I'm in the process of writing a Tcl graphical client, to let folks hack their
browser as if it were a running lisp process. For day-to-day browsing, I'm
mostly using Elpher right now, which is an emacs Gemini and Gopher client
written in Elisp, and is fantastic.

I'm at gemini://acidic.website/

~~~
squiggleblaz
I understand why acidic, thanks to your explanation, but why website, when you
don't have a website?

(I also like acidic food sometimes. I'm not sure if I like acidic coffee; so
far, the only coffee I have successfully consumed is espresso without milk,
water or sugar and some is surely better than others. I was certainly
surprised to discover that plain espresso is actually better than adding milk,
water or sugar.)

Is there a way to actually reply within Gemini? I could set up my own server,
I guess, but you would never know I had.

~~~
Karrot_Kream
> I understand why acidic, thanks to your explanation, but why website, when
> you don't have a website?

Because the domain was incredibly cheap, and I may eventually host some HTTP
content there as well, but I'm not sure. The main reason was just the price
heh.

> Is there a way to actually reply within Gemini? I could set up my own
> server, I guess, but you would never know I had.

Nope, no comments. You could email me, of course, but I'm thinking of setting
up an ActivityPub server on the box so folks can message me if they're
interested.

------
ken
One thing I never see in these analyses is ease of setting up a server. Back
when I was in college and got my first computer, I could install a simple web
server, drop any file in its folder, and view that file in my web browser. If
it was HTML, and I got the HTML wrong, it would still display most of the
page.

Gopher wasn't like that at all. I downloaded the Gopher server and ran it.
Then I put a file in its folder, and it didn't show up. You had to (IIRC)
write a special index file to tell it how to serve each file. If you didn't
get it perfectly right, it wouldn't show up at all. And of course the error
messages and documentation were somewhere between "terrible" and "missing".

I wanted Gopher to succeed, because I liked the simple, regular organization
of information, rather than the crazy anything-goes world of the World Wide
Web. I just couldn't figure out how to get it to work.

------
every
I still maintain a gopher presence[1] as a mirror. Once it was determined that
gopher could neither be monetized nor weaponized, it was doomed to obscurity.
It is an open academic tool for open academic purposes. As an aside, I
actually saw the initial announcement on USENET about CERN releasing something
called a browser for something else they called the World Wide Web. I couldn't
see the point since we already had gopher, veronica, jughead, et al.
Absolutely prescient on my part...

[1][https://gopher.commons.host/gopher://gopher.club/1/users/eve...](https://gopher.commons.host/gopher://gopher.club/1/users/every/)

~~~
xkapastel
> Once it was determined that gopher could neither be monetized nor
> weaponized, it was doomed to obscurity.

This is a cynical rewriting of history. More likely, Gopher lost to HTTP due
to a combination of random chance, network effects, and simply not being as
user friendly to e.g. set up a server. HTTP was also an "open academic tool"
for "open academic purposes". Only later, due to HTTP's success, was it
monetized and "weaponized".

~~~
davidgay
> This is a cynical rewriting of history.

Seconded. I was on the Internet before gopher, and I never really saw the
point over regular ftp (and, a quick glance at the wikipedia page right now
doesn't really tell me what the real extra value over ftp is).

Conversely, the web's value was immediately obvious.

~~~
every
Gopher was a menu-driven interface via ftp to search, find and download files
for academics who weren't particularly computer savey. It also gave them a
platform to publish their own research for others and have it indexed and
searchable. It was never meant to be a popular format...

~~~
guenthert
Well, I think popular in the context of Internet meant something different
then as it does now. But yes, gopher seemed then just like 'nother service,
while WWW was a revolution in the mid-nineties.

------
enriquto
There _are_ still some gopher holes. For instance, the bitreich is quite
active:

    
    
         gopher://bitreich.org
    

Some of the content is rather funny, other is a bit too much for insiders to
be comprehensible. It seems to be a "pure" fork of the suckless.org community.

~~~
Jaruzel
When I mapped Gopherspace back in 2018, there were over 300 active gopher
holes:

[http://www.jaruzel.com/gopher/mapping-
gopherspace](http://www.jaruzel.com/gopher/mapping-gopherspace)

~~~
kamalatta
I have a list of 634 gopher servers, which I check daily for their
"aliveness":

gopher://kamalatta.ddnss.de/1/links

There are some duplicates (different domains for the same content, IP
addresses) but roughly 364 domains are constantly online.

------
orzi
I used Gopher to download MPEG-1 videos back in 1993. Whole two of them. One
was egg shot by a bullet and second one was Michael Jackson's Smooth criminal
anti-gravity lean clip. Exciting times.

------
S_A_P
I was in college getting my MIS degree a little before this article was
written, and gopher was already being described is antiquated and vintage
technology.

The web had a much broader appeal to me and as soon as I could I set up a page
on our schools web server. I then took a deep dive into CGI scripting and that
got me to start coding.

------
tingletech
I remember the first time I read about the web was on gopher.

A few years later (1997), part of my job was to migrate a bunch of university
gopher holes to the web.

------
dang
See also:

2016
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10964366](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10964366)

2009
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=828995](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=828995)

------
vbgamer45
I just built a rough gopher server for createaforum.com just for fun
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nws5oVpPY_g](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nws5oVpPY_g)

------
excitom
TL;DR Hypertext links and graphics.

~~~
mobilemidget
you say graphics, I read 'porn' ... never used gopher, did get an
application/icon when installing internet software for one of the first ISPs I
used, but I guess little adult content to be found on gopher?

~~~
squiggleblaz
Cynical. Generally speaking, articles with images and color are more
interesting to random browsers. Even variable width fonts are more interesting
than fixed width fonts.

Given a HTML page using the default serif font that shows a picture of you and
a cat and talks a little about your research, or a plain text file using the
default fixed width font that talks a little about your research and says "in
the menu below, clyde.jpg is a photo of my cat", then most people are going to
prefer the first option.

