> At GopherCon 1993, it was announced that Gopher servers would need to pay for the privilege of using the protocol... Well, that didn’t work out. People were angry and many felt betrayed. They weren’t quiet about any of it either.
> If one were to attempt to identify a single failure of Gopher in competition with the web, it would be the licensing costs. No such fee existed for the World Wide Web.
This, a thousand times. I watched as this happened. The instant that announcement was made, gopher was finished. Gopher might have lost later as HTML kept adding features, but by the time those features were added to HTML, gopher had already lost.
It seems to me that Gopher just failed to keep up with the times. Embedding images into the page was a killer feature for HTML and Gopher was still doggedly text based because they were still supporting the VT100 users that had been the core userbase. Plus the web went on to support text formatting, tables, and even eventually layout.
The article isn't entirely correct about the early web being completely free. Netscape was not free software, at least on paper. In practice they didn't try to stop people from spreading it far and wide and I think the sales were somewhat modest despite being the core element of a technological revolution. Also, I guess NCSA Mosiac was technically around, but it lacked enough features to make it a second class citizen compared to Netscape Navigator.
Gopher was how I first got on the Internet in 1991. Cleveland FreeNet (like an Internet BBS) supported connecting to other FreeNets and Buffalo FreeNet had gopher. I searched lots of ftp sites, read lots. You also had 1.5MB of space you could use to download software to temporarily on Buffalo FreeNet. With gopher, two freenets, and zmodem, I downloaded and installed my first Linux system in 1992: 0.95a running on a 386sx16 with 4mb of memory and a 40mb HD. Gopher opened up the Internet when I was a kid in high school and the web wasn’t a thing. I’ll forever be grateful.
Interesting that the article brings up the original 1990s GopherCons (which were conferences for discussing the Gopher protocol). I'm mildly annoyed that the Go programming community (which uses a gopher as a mascot) has reused the name for their conventions, but I guess it's been unused for a while.
If the idea of a text first structured hyper text protocol interests you, consider taking a look at the Gemini protocol, a modern equivalent. https://geminiprotocol.net/
I first got involved with the Internet in the early 90's (summer of 1991, I think), right when Gopher was taking off, but before the WWW. Times were so much simpler.
The Internet Gopher from Minnesota
(abortretry.fail)108 points by rbanffy 11 November 2024 | 43 comments
Comments
> If one were to attempt to identify a single failure of Gopher in competition with the web, it would be the licensing costs. No such fee existed for the World Wide Web.
This, a thousand times. I watched as this happened. The instant that announcement was made, gopher was finished. Gopher might have lost later as HTML kept adding features, but by the time those features were added to HTML, gopher had already lost.
The article isn't entirely correct about the early web being completely free. Netscape was not free software, at least on paper. In practice they didn't try to stop people from spreading it far and wide and I think the sales were somewhat modest despite being the core element of a technological revolution. Also, I guess NCSA Mosiac was technically around, but it lacked enough features to make it a second class citizen compared to Netscape Navigator.
Even the original IBM PC can comfortably browse gopher sites with gopherus[0].
0. https://gopherus.sourceforge.net/
8-Track instead of cassette
Minidiscs instead of CDs
Yahoo instead of Google
Gopher instead of HTTP
I want to believe that such alternative universe exists. How do I get there? I'm tired of this one...
Other hostnames we had from bands and SciFi
huskerdu / nirvana / supernova / arcwelder
hafnhaf (big bonus points if you can figure this one out, lol!)
ashpool / tessier / joeboy / countzero
gopher://magical.fish
As for the client, you can use Lynx under Unix/Linux and Lagrange under everything else.