"Gopher seems to have won out"
January 1, 2017 9:42 PM Subscribe
In which we meet an adorably-described Mac SE/30 known as the Mother Gopher. The rise and fall of the Gopher protocol.
I don't remember what kind of content exists, but if you create a shell account at SDF you can use a bonafide gopher client that's already installed and configured on their servers, and apparently upload or create your own files in the gopherspace. You can also do a lot of other archaic internet things. From their FAQ:
Many people think the http protocol has deprecated gopher, but that just isn't true. Where do you think GOPHERs live? underground.
posted by mammal at 10:48 PM on January 1, 2017 [8 favorites]
Many people think the http protocol has deprecated gopher, but that just isn't true. Where do you think GOPHERs live? underground.
posted by mammal at 10:48 PM on January 1, 2017 [8 favorites]
“I remember the exact moment I knew I was no longer on the right track,” says Lindner. “It was September 9, 1993. I was invited to give a talk about Gopher at Princeton, and I had my slides all printed up on my little university-budget black-and-white foils. The person presenting before me was talking about the future of the Web, with full-color LCD projection. I said, 'I think I see where things are going.' ”That's about as good of a thumbnail description of the Eternal September as you're likely to see.
posted by Halloween Jack at 10:53 PM on January 1, 2017 [18 favorites]
The Internet for Kids was a book which made a huge impression on me as a child. My family didn't even own a computer at the time but GOSH DARN IT I was going to be READY to use the INTERNET at school.
I don't remember a lot about that book, but I do remember a chapter about Gopher, and wondering why I never saw any hint of it when my school finally was hooked up to Internet. Now I see that it was obsolete even by the time that book was published.
posted by invokeuse at 12:18 AM on January 2, 2017 [3 favorites]
I don't remember a lot about that book, but I do remember a chapter about Gopher, and wondering why I never saw any hint of it when my school finally was hooked up to Internet. Now I see that it was obsolete even by the time that book was published.
posted by invokeuse at 12:18 AM on January 2, 2017 [3 favorites]
In 1992 I gave a presentation to the information professionals at UC Santa Cruz explaining that the WWW's over-reliance on graphics meant it would always be too slow to use over dialup. Gopher was much more grounded in text and was the clear future.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 12:35 AM on January 2, 2017 [22 favorites]
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 12:35 AM on January 2, 2017 [22 favorites]
Great article. I went looking for YT of Gopher and found this now-hilarious video from 1995.
posted by persona au gratin at 1:08 AM on January 2, 2017 [2 favorites]
posted by persona au gratin at 1:08 AM on January 2, 2017 [2 favorites]
Skip to 3:00ish for Gopher, btw.
posted by persona au gratin at 1:08 AM on January 2, 2017
posted by persona au gratin at 1:08 AM on January 2, 2017
I first encountered Gopher in early 1994, at about the same time as I downloaded Mosaic. The state of internet applications at the time was such that a page called something like "Internet Library" (seen here in a contemporary screenshot of Tim Berner's Lee's Next workstation) - that was a short list of mainly academic links. It included CERN, NCSA, the Lynx web browser and a link to The University of Minnesota to get a copy of Gopher.
I know that the name is a clever amalgamation with multiple meanings involving "go-for" and tunneling and mascots - but being associated with an animal that looks like this was never going to help get the word spread beyond the nerds in the computer room.
Its an interesting article - and I like that the development team got the audience reaction "you can't do that!" when they first talked about the protocol. I remember getting a similar reaction from somebody when I showed a manager (at the telco where I worked) a link to the CERN site explaining it was in Switzerland 'who the fuck is paying for the phone call for you to do this?'. Apple carts were indeed upturned. I also liked the detail that their entire development team numbered 6.
posted by rongorongo at 1:14 AM on January 2, 2017 [3 favorites]
I know that the name is a clever amalgamation with multiple meanings involving "go-for" and tunneling and mascots - but being associated with an animal that looks like this was never going to help get the word spread beyond the nerds in the computer room.
Its an interesting article - and I like that the development team got the audience reaction "you can't do that!" when they first talked about the protocol. I remember getting a similar reaction from somebody when I showed a manager (at the telco where I worked) a link to the CERN site explaining it was in Switzerland 'who the fuck is paying for the phone call for you to do this?'. Apple carts were indeed upturned. I also liked the detail that their entire development team numbered 6.
posted by rongorongo at 1:14 AM on January 2, 2017 [3 favorites]
Oh, Tell Me No Lies, we must have been sharing a brain around the same time. Seeing Mosaic for the first time in the uni labs, I remember loudly proclaiming (as it glacially loaded several pictures in a page) "Well, that's going to ruin everything!"
An old friend who was there at the time occasionally reminds me how wrong I got it. In recent years, I've started responding "Surely only half-wrong."
posted by Lesser Spotted Potoroo at 1:15 AM on January 2, 2017 [7 favorites]
An old friend who was there at the time occasionally reminds me how wrong I got it. In recent years, I've started responding "Surely only half-wrong."
posted by Lesser Spotted Potoroo at 1:15 AM on January 2, 2017 [7 favorites]
Here's Gopher via proxy: http://gopher.floodgap.com/gopher/gw?
posted by jim in austin at 1:19 AM on January 2, 2017 [4 favorites]
posted by jim in austin at 1:19 AM on January 2, 2017 [4 favorites]
Veronica - the gopher-space's search engine (featured in persona au gratin's link) - its name is derived EITHER from Veronica Lodge - who was the girlfriend of Archie - (which was the matching protocol for FTP space search) OR it stands for "Very Easy Rodent-Oriented Net-wide Index to Computer Archives."
I pity the poor schmuck forced to choose which definition to use when pitching some Gopher related development to a shark tank of VCs.
posted by rongorongo at 2:16 AM on January 2, 2017 [7 favorites]
I pity the poor schmuck forced to choose which definition to use when pitching some Gopher related development to a shark tank of VCs.
posted by rongorongo at 2:16 AM on January 2, 2017 [7 favorites]
Does Archie qualify as a 'protocol'? Memory is hazy, but I seem to recall you just telnetted to an Archie instance and then used its command interface to search the FTP it indexed. Is that wrong?
Also, WAIS was a thing for a minute.
posted by snuffleupagus at 3:10 AM on January 2, 2017 [5 favorites]
Also, WAIS was a thing for a minute.
posted by snuffleupagus at 3:10 AM on January 2, 2017 [5 favorites]
hits bong
but isn't a protocol just a set of standard commands, whether you type them by hand or have a client generate them, man?
passes bong
posted by idiopath at 3:58 AM on January 2, 2017 [21 favorites]
but isn't a protocol just a set of standard commands, whether you type them by hand or have a client generate them, man?
passes bong
posted by idiopath at 3:58 AM on January 2, 2017 [21 favorites]
I pity the poor schmuck forced to choose which definition to use when pitching some Gopher related development to a shark tank of VCs.It's hard to imagine now, but that wasn't really a thing at the time. The Internet was based around academia rather than business. Gopher came from the University of Minnesota, the Web came from CERN, Mosaic came from the National Center for Supercomputing Applications.
To my recollection, it was Netscape that turned the Internet into a get-rich-quick scheme. For a while everyone wanted to be "the next Netscape", much like how "the next Facebook" was a thing more recently. Then Microsoft entered the ring, at the time still very much an 800 lb gorilla, and soon nobody wanted to be "the next Netscape". My own theory is that with that move, Microsoft pretty much killed investment in desktop apps (VCs were asking "What happens to your business when Microsoft bundles a similar program with the OS?") and in doing so contributed to some extent to the dot-com bubble.
posted by swr at 4:14 AM on January 2, 2017 [10 favorites]
Microsoft pretty much killed investment in desktop apps (VCs were asking "What happens to your business when Microsoft bundles a similar program with the OS?") and in doing so contributed to some extent to the dot-com bubble.
OTOH, man, the idea of not having to deploy software to clients, but rather just install a new perl script in cgi-bin and *EVERYONE* is updated was the "killer app" for me, and I ended up writing an API to get data to/from the 4GL we had been using ( which, admittedly would work over serial terminals, so it wasn't really updating 100 clients, but rather 20 servers, still ONE is way better than 20. And scales appropriately. ( The owner was on an acquisition spree, and we ended up with offices in other states... )
posted by mikelieman at 4:22 AM on January 2, 2017 [5 favorites]
OTOH, man, the idea of not having to deploy software to clients, but rather just install a new perl script in cgi-bin and *EVERYONE* is updated was the "killer app" for me, and I ended up writing an API to get data to/from the 4GL we had been using ( which, admittedly would work over serial terminals, so it wasn't really updating 100 clients, but rather 20 servers, still ONE is way better than 20. And scales appropriately. ( The owner was on an acquisition spree, and we ended up with offices in other states... )
posted by mikelieman at 4:22 AM on January 2, 2017 [5 favorites]
It's hard to imagine now, but that wasn't really a thing at the time. The Internet was based around academia rather than business.
The article does mention that, by 1993, the University of Minnesota did try to introduce a charging model for those running Gopher servers. There were long-established people in academia who had the job of making software pay its own way through patents, startups, licensing, consultancy. Only there seems to have been an unbridgeable gap between those working in that role and those actually developing the software. It was a much more innocent era in that respect - but yes, failed technology exploitation attempts by universities pre-dated failed dot.com ideas backed by VCs - by a few years.
posted by rongorongo at 4:40 AM on January 2, 2017 [4 favorites]
The article does mention that, by 1993, the University of Minnesota did try to introduce a charging model for those running Gopher servers. There were long-established people in academia who had the job of making software pay its own way through patents, startups, licensing, consultancy. Only there seems to have been an unbridgeable gap between those working in that role and those actually developing the software. It was a much more innocent era in that respect - but yes, failed technology exploitation attempts by universities pre-dated failed dot.com ideas backed by VCs - by a few years.
posted by rongorongo at 4:40 AM on January 2, 2017 [4 favorites]
but isn't a protocol just a set of standard commands, whether you type them by hand or have a client generate them, man?
Hmm. But isn't Telnet already the protocol? Is this a.....
(...wait for it....)
Metaprotocol?
wiggles eyebrows, passes back
posted by snuffleupagus at 4:50 AM on January 2, 2017 [5 favorites]
Hmm. But isn't Telnet already the protocol? Is this a.....
(...wait for it....)
Metaprotocol?
wiggles eyebrows, passes back
posted by snuffleupagus at 4:50 AM on January 2, 2017 [5 favorites]
It's hard to imagine now, but that wasn't really a thing at the time. The Internet was based around academia rather than business.
I remember reading this Wired article, Billions Registered from Oct 1994. And scroll down into the article, it mentions Adam Curry from MTV putting up a gopher site in 1993 after registering the mtv.com name.
From the story:
I'm waiting for a call back from McDonald's, the hamburger people. They're trying to find me someone – anyone – within corporate headquarters who knows what the Internet is and can tell me why there are no Golden Arches on the information highway.
...
Williamson [from InterNIC registrar] said that a year ago, his agency received 300 requests a month for domain names; now, more than 1,300 requests stream in each month.
posted by jjj606 at 4:59 AM on January 2, 2017 [1 favorite]
I remember reading this Wired article, Billions Registered from Oct 1994. And scroll down into the article, it mentions Adam Curry from MTV putting up a gopher site in 1993 after registering the mtv.com name.
From the story:
I'm waiting for a call back from McDonald's, the hamburger people. They're trying to find me someone – anyone – within corporate headquarters who knows what the Internet is and can tell me why there are no Golden Arches on the information highway.
...
Williamson [from InterNIC registrar] said that a year ago, his agency received 300 requests a month for domain names; now, more than 1,300 requests stream in each month.
posted by jjj606 at 4:59 AM on January 2, 2017 [1 favorite]
being associated with an animal that looks like this was never going to help get the word spread beyond the nerds in the computer room
When discovering the early internet circa 1994 (but on the other side of the Atlantic), I remember looking up the word gopher in my English-French dictionary and the first translation provided was spermophile. I was "WTF internet???" for a few minutes before I found out that a spermophile was indeed some sort of small rodent and not a neologism coined by Richard von Krafft-Ebing.
posted by elgilito at 4:59 AM on January 2, 2017 [9 favorites]
When discovering the early internet circa 1994 (but on the other side of the Atlantic), I remember looking up the word gopher in my English-French dictionary and the first translation provided was spermophile. I was "WTF internet???" for a few minutes before I found out that a spermophile was indeed some sort of small rodent and not a neologism coined by Richard von Krafft-Ebing.
posted by elgilito at 4:59 AM on January 2, 2017 [9 favorites]
archie's interface seems to have been enough of a de facto protocol for there to have been screen-scraping-type gui clients written for it
can we open a window
posted by tss at 5:02 AM on January 2, 2017 [5 favorites]
can we open a window
posted by tss at 5:02 AM on January 2, 2017 [5 favorites]
Indeed. I guess most Internet based services and applications are in a way, protocols all the way down.
Early internet nostalgia is a pleasant New Years treat. =D
posted by snuffleupagus at 5:08 AM on January 2, 2017 [2 favorites]
Early internet nostalgia is a pleasant New Years treat. =D
posted by snuffleupagus at 5:08 AM on January 2, 2017 [2 favorites]
Hmm. But isn't Telnet already the protocol? Is this a..... (...wait for it....) Metaprotocol?Metafilter: Telnet firewall
posted by swr at 5:10 AM on January 2, 2017 [2 favorites]
The Twin Cities were a proto-Silicon Valley then
It isn't proto-anything. It's still a computing powerhouse and always has been.
BUT, what REALLY cements the Twin Cities in computing history is that the Oregon Trail was originally written there.
posted by mfu at 5:20 AM on January 2, 2017 [13 favorites]
It isn't proto-anything. It's still a computing powerhouse and always has been.
BUT, what REALLY cements the Twin Cities in computing history is that the Oregon Trail was originally written there.
posted by mfu at 5:20 AM on January 2, 2017 [13 favorites]
So the web won because it could do ads and porn, making it obviously the better -- wait, what?
posted by Bringer Tom at 6:08 AM on January 2, 2017 [3 favorites]
posted by Bringer Tom at 6:08 AM on January 2, 2017 [3 favorites]
I have this odd daydream/fantasy of the future, where energy limits have made the Internet as we know it today too expensive to operate frivolously. In that scenario, the Internet is returned to the stewardship of academic librarians, and curation becomes an integral part of finding information again. Quality returns. Sources are verified or else they are not indexed.
I can dream, right?!?!
posted by overeducated_alligator at 6:22 AM on January 2, 2017 [5 favorites]
I can dream, right?!?!
posted by overeducated_alligator at 6:22 AM on January 2, 2017 [5 favorites]
being associated with an animal that looks like this was never going to help get the word spread beyond the nerds in the computer room
I mean look at the colossal failure of Disney with that mouse character.
posted by Dr Dracator at 6:43 AM on January 2, 2017
I mean look at the colossal failure of Disney with that mouse character.
posted by Dr Dracator at 6:43 AM on January 2, 2017
Sources are verified or else they are not indexed. I can dream, right?!?!
And the whole thing is hosted on a TRS-80 Model I.
posted by Bringer Tom at 6:46 AM on January 2, 2017 [4 favorites]
And the whole thing is hosted on a TRS-80 Model I.
posted by Bringer Tom at 6:46 AM on January 2, 2017 [4 favorites]
I don't remember what kind of content exists, but if you create a shell account at SDF you can
...have all your e-mail and data lost forever when they decide to sell your account out from under you to somebody else.
(I am never going to let this go.)
posted by Shmuel510 at 7:42 AM on January 2, 2017 [3 favorites]
...have all your e-mail and data lost forever when they decide to sell your account out from under you to somebody else.
(I am never going to let this go.)
posted by Shmuel510 at 7:42 AM on January 2, 2017 [3 favorites]
When I started CompSci grad school we had an NSFnet connection but no DNS. You had to know the IP address of the site you wanted to connect to. By the time I graduated in 1994 we had Mosaic (and DNS) and I was able to actually demonstrate sound to the local PBS affiliate for a show they did on the now commercial-friendly Internet. Gopher had its time and place but as the Internet expanded there was no way it could compete with the WWW and its sexy graphics and media.
posted by tommasz at 8:16 AM on January 2, 2017 [1 favorite]
posted by tommasz at 8:16 AM on January 2, 2017 [1 favorite]
I couldn't really grok telnet at the time, so gopher was my first exposure to the internet. This is an accurate portrayal.
posted by blue_beetle at 11:08 AM on January 2, 2017
posted by blue_beetle at 11:08 AM on January 2, 2017
Well, the web might be useful to provide some sort of USENET search, but rec.pats.cats is enough for me most days.
posted by benzenedream at 11:37 AM on January 2, 2017
posted by benzenedream at 11:37 AM on January 2, 2017
Also, WAIS was a thing for a minute.— @snuffleupugus
Weirdly useless trivial: Z39.50, the ANSI protocol for database interaction, and WAIS have an intertwined history. Z39.50 was still in use up until a few years ago. I believe it's now been replaced by RDF+SPARQL.
posted by petrilli at 1:25 PM on January 2, 2017
This is a great article. Thinking about old academic computer labs and old deep internet makes me happy.
posted by limeonaire at 1:34 PM on January 2, 2017 [1 favorite]
posted by limeonaire at 1:34 PM on January 2, 2017 [1 favorite]
Around '93 I recall being impressed that a mod made a LambdaMOO-gopher bridge, which turned out to be possibly the ultimate bridge to and from nowhere.
posted by GuyZero at 1:42 PM on January 2, 2017 [6 favorites]
posted by GuyZero at 1:42 PM on January 2, 2017 [6 favorites]
Z39.50 was still in use up until a few years ago. I believe it's now been replaced by RDF+SPARQL.
At least among libraries, Z39.50 is still in common use as a means of finding and retrieving catalog metadata records, although various other protocols are increasingly used.
posted by metaquarry at 2:15 PM on January 2, 2017 [1 favorite]
At least among libraries, Z39.50 is still in common use as a means of finding and retrieving catalog metadata records, although various other protocols are increasingly used.
posted by metaquarry at 2:15 PM on January 2, 2017 [1 favorite]
I was writing this stuff up as it happened for a computer magazine where I had a 'what's happening that'll matter in the future' column. Gopher, Veronica et al were all quite exciting and fun, and geeks like me got excited about them, but it wasn't until Mosaic appeared that you could put an ordinary computer user in front of it and you'd see the switch being thrown for the lightbulb in their head.
It helped that by then WIMP guis had become standard and yer average PC-toting human had begun to get comfortable with the (actually rather subtle) way that data and control paths were merging, and that modems were just about fast enough to deal with the additional graphic crud that a visual interface brings along with it. There were a lot of factors involved in the way the user experience of the Internet developed and the Web became the primary focus for innovation; ads and porn weren't trend leaders,they flooded in where the people were, as they had done previously.
posted by Devonian at 2:27 PM on January 2, 2017 [2 favorites]
It helped that by then WIMP guis had become standard and yer average PC-toting human had begun to get comfortable with the (actually rather subtle) way that data and control paths were merging, and that modems were just about fast enough to deal with the additional graphic crud that a visual interface brings along with it. There were a lot of factors involved in the way the user experience of the Internet developed and the Web became the primary focus for innovation; ads and porn weren't trend leaders,they flooded in where the people were, as they had done previously.
posted by Devonian at 2:27 PM on January 2, 2017 [2 favorites]
And the whole thing is hosted on a TRS-80 Model I.
Model III or there'll be trouble!
Also, will someone give me $200 to buy a broken TRS-80 Model III for some reason?
posted by petebest at 3:41 PM on January 2, 2017
Model III or there'll be trouble!
Also, will someone give me $200 to buy a broken TRS-80 Model III for some reason?
posted by petebest at 3:41 PM on January 2, 2017
Mefi Gopher keeps is real.
This makes me so happy.
posted by persona au gratin at 5:52 PM on January 2, 2017 [1 favorite]
This makes me so happy.
posted by persona au gratin at 5:52 PM on January 2, 2017 [1 favorite]
I used a lot of Telnet and Gopher and Fetch and then Mosaic back in the day. (Still don't know most of the terms being used in the thread, but apparently I did OK with that ignorance.) When I was a kid my friend's dad had access to a BBS through which he'd download games. And that was kind of mindblowing at the time. So Gopher was super-impressive. So I still appreciate it for what it was.
And to this day, I appreciate the Google search engine. Because what we had with Webcrawler and Alta Vista and Lycos just sucked.
posted by persona au gratin at 6:00 PM on January 2, 2017 [1 favorite]
And to this day, I appreciate the Google search engine. Because what we had with Webcrawler and Alta Vista and Lycos just sucked.
posted by persona au gratin at 6:00 PM on January 2, 2017 [1 favorite]
When I started CompSci grad school we had an NSFnet connection but no DNS
You mean you were on the dark web you criminal and/or terrorist!
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 7:11 PM on January 2, 2017
You mean you were on the dark web you criminal and/or terrorist!
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 7:11 PM on January 2, 2017
Model III or there'll be trouble!
Hey man I think it's up to you, nobody else is gonna do it.
No I don't have a TRS-80. I could probably emulate one with a Parallax Propeller but it would take a few days to spin up the code.
posted by Bringer Tom at 7:39 PM on January 2, 2017
Hey man I think it's up to you, nobody else is gonna do it.
No I don't have a TRS-80. I could probably emulate one with a Parallax Propeller but it would take a few days to spin up the code.
posted by Bringer Tom at 7:39 PM on January 2, 2017
In 1992, while a reporter at a suburban paper in greater Boston, I worked with the World ( the world's first commercial ISP) to publish election results. We used finger. My favorite response was from somebody at a military base somewhere where he couldn't listen to the radio, but had an Internet connection, so was able to keep up with the returns by fingering our account.
posted by adamg at 7:47 PM on January 2, 2017 [2 favorites]
posted by adamg at 7:47 PM on January 2, 2017 [2 favorites]
And to this day, I appreciate the Google search engine.
On my first job where I had actual broadband internet access, we used this (amazingly, it's still online)
Dogpile
and the premise (back in the day) was it combined results from all those crappy search engines...
posted by randomkeystrike at 8:09 PM on January 2, 2017
On my first job where I had actual broadband internet access, we used this (amazingly, it's still online)
Dogpile
and the premise (back in the day) was it combined results from all those crappy search engines...
posted by randomkeystrike at 8:09 PM on January 2, 2017
Yeah, I can't remember the year, '93 maybe, when an older nerd friend of mine took me in to the computer lab at UW-Madison, full of HP machines with heartbeats slowly blinking, and he showed me the web, and I remember my thoughts being along the same lines as above. There's no way this could scale out over 14.4k modems, I thought! (Or possibly even just 9600 baud? I forget if 14.4 was just a glimmer or not back then.) Gopher is sleek and fast and if you wanted to transfer a picture to your local machine, it was no big deal to get that one image.
2 years later I was working at an ISP and selling it to average Joes.
posted by Kyol at 8:43 PM on January 2, 2017 [1 favorite]
2 years later I was working at an ISP and selling it to average Joes.
posted by Kyol at 8:43 PM on January 2, 2017 [1 favorite]
I know that the name is a clever amalgamation with multiple meanings involving "go-for" and tunneling and mascots - but being associated with an animal that looks like this was never going to help get the word spread beyond the nerds in the computer room.
Har har! Yes, like having a plumber as the mascot means your video game company is destined to fail! -1 COMPLETELY WRONG. The fact is, people will normalize almost anything, if the thing itself is useful.
I pity the poor schmuck forced to choose which definition to use when pitching some Gopher related development to a shark tank of VCs.
That is just it. Nothing involving the internet at that time would have been venture capitalized. It was pretty much a government and academic thing at that phase. It wasn't until Netscape that companies started thinking about actually making (gasp) money on the internet.
Also, please remember not to link to the Daily Mail if you can at all help it. Tea and Kittens, everyone. You too can help make the World Wide Web, and the world's news media environment, a better place.
Gopher had its time and place but as the Internet expanded there was no way it could compete with the WWW and its sexy graphics and media.
You're right to some extent, but it's worth nothing that those sites that are still coded in raw HTML, still laid out using tables, sites like the Bubble Bobble Info Page, still existing in this year, are almost assured to have a very high information-to-representation ratio. Gopher would be the ultimate exemplar of this. What matters isn't that everyone can find it, what matters is if the people who will appreciate it will find it.
Makes me want to start up a Gopher site myself, honestly.
posted by JHarris at 12:26 AM on January 3, 2017 [2 favorites]
Har har! Yes, like having a plumber as the mascot means your video game company is destined to fail! -1 COMPLETELY WRONG. The fact is, people will normalize almost anything, if the thing itself is useful.
I pity the poor schmuck forced to choose which definition to use when pitching some Gopher related development to a shark tank of VCs.
That is just it. Nothing involving the internet at that time would have been venture capitalized. It was pretty much a government and academic thing at that phase. It wasn't until Netscape that companies started thinking about actually making (gasp) money on the internet.
Also, please remember not to link to the Daily Mail if you can at all help it. Tea and Kittens, everyone. You too can help make the World Wide Web, and the world's news media environment, a better place.
Gopher had its time and place but as the Internet expanded there was no way it could compete with the WWW and its sexy graphics and media.
You're right to some extent, but it's worth nothing that those sites that are still coded in raw HTML, still laid out using tables, sites like the Bubble Bobble Info Page, still existing in this year, are almost assured to have a very high information-to-representation ratio. Gopher would be the ultimate exemplar of this. What matters isn't that everyone can find it, what matters is if the people who will appreciate it will find it.
Makes me want to start up a Gopher site myself, honestly.
posted by JHarris at 12:26 AM on January 3, 2017 [2 favorites]
That is just it. Nothing involving the internet at that time would have been venture capitalized. It was pretty much a government and academic thing at that phase. It wasn't until Netscape that companies started thinking about actually making (gasp) money on the internet.
Unrestricted commercial traffic across the entire Internet wasn't strictly legal until 1995 when the government-funded NSFNET backbone (that Al Gore was so unjustifiably mocked for enabling, along with the National Center for Supercomputing Applications that gave birth to the first widely available web browser, Mosaic) was turned off. NSFNET's Acceptable Use Policy forbade most commercial traffic across its wires. Since NSFNET's T3's connected most of the Internet's privately owned networks to each other, its AUP prohibiting its use for anything other than research & education, ie making money, held sway. When it went away so did the restrictions & the mad scramble to make money on or from the Internet began.
posted by scalefree at 2:01 AM on January 3, 2017 [9 favorites]
Unrestricted commercial traffic across the entire Internet wasn't strictly legal until 1995 when the government-funded NSFNET backbone (that Al Gore was so unjustifiably mocked for enabling, along with the National Center for Supercomputing Applications that gave birth to the first widely available web browser, Mosaic) was turned off. NSFNET's Acceptable Use Policy forbade most commercial traffic across its wires. Since NSFNET's T3's connected most of the Internet's privately owned networks to each other, its AUP prohibiting its use for anything other than research & education, ie making money, held sway. When it went away so did the restrictions & the mad scramble to make money on or from the Internet began.
posted by scalefree at 2:01 AM on January 3, 2017 [9 favorites]
Also, the infrastructure for mass Internet usage just wasn't there. Demon, one of the UK's first ISPs, started out as a London-only dial-up provider off the back of a few users from the Cix bulletin board system working out that it would be possible to make it fly by charging a tenner a month to users, and that was pretty much run off PCs plugged in willy-nilly as points of presence, wherever there was enough demand to justify a leased line and someone had some room to host. As it spread across the country, you could volunteer as a PoP host and bung an Apricot computer in your cupboard...
The telcos did not like the Internet. You'd be hard pushed to find a more potent mix of ignorance, fear and instinctive rejection, together with instinctive greed as people started to buy second phone lines and use the hell out of them (UK had per-minute charges on local calls). I'm told,by someone who was present, that when BT's R&D arm made a presentation of what the Internet could be to the board, the CEO said "Oh, this is a fad. It's just like CB". Meanwhile, people like me were filling up vans with computers, modems, hubs and cables, and going from venue to venue setting up 'Try the Internet here' tables whenever we could - and these were proper PCs the size of tombstones with hernia-inducing monitors. It was quite amazing how many concurrent browser sessions could be supported off one 28.8kbps dial-up line, and how much people wanted to see, hear, smell, touch and taste this Internet thing they'd heard about. Heady days.
posted by Devonian at 5:59 AM on January 3, 2017 [6 favorites]
The telcos did not like the Internet. You'd be hard pushed to find a more potent mix of ignorance, fear and instinctive rejection, together with instinctive greed as people started to buy second phone lines and use the hell out of them (UK had per-minute charges on local calls). I'm told,by someone who was present, that when BT's R&D arm made a presentation of what the Internet could be to the board, the CEO said "Oh, this is a fad. It's just like CB". Meanwhile, people like me were filling up vans with computers, modems, hubs and cables, and going from venue to venue setting up 'Try the Internet here' tables whenever we could - and these were proper PCs the size of tombstones with hernia-inducing monitors. It was quite amazing how many concurrent browser sessions could be supported off one 28.8kbps dial-up line, and how much people wanted to see, hear, smell, touch and taste this Internet thing they'd heard about. Heady days.
posted by Devonian at 5:59 AM on January 3, 2017 [6 favorites]
Hi Devonian: Well I was working as a BT R&D guy in this era - and can confirm much of what you say about the stance of the telcos at the time. BT had an R&D centre at Martlesham Heath in Suffolk. It should have had people who knew about what the internet was back in the early 90s - and it did! For example Sam Fedida had developed "Viewdata" while from the early 1970s after being inspired by Vanevar Bush's "As We May think" - this was launched as Prestel way back in 1979 - and it was similar to Gopher in many respects (the technology was also used in Ceefax). Equally people at Martlesham had been involved in packet switching technology going right back to the days when Donald Davis started experimenting with the technology back in the 60s.
...Somebody could write an interesting alternative history where some of the culture that had driven Turing at Bletchley Park had been capitalised to establish the UK as the global leader in computer technology: the first Digital exchange back in Highgate Wood in the 60s could have been rolled out rather than abandoned, we could be using the public key cryptography developed at GCHQ in 1973, and we'd be all be reading this on our "viewdata browsers" over a Donald Davis designed packet-switched network....
The problem was that the technology was miserably understood and exploited by the company's management - and the people who did understand had moved on or lurked in shadowy back rooms. In 1993 Martlesham Heath's several thousand R&D people connected to the internet on a single, paltry connection - and the company came close to losing the domain name "bt.com" because somebody in purchasing was complaining about the subscription cost. Prestel - again pretty much like Gopher - was closed down in 1994 just as the wordlwide web took off - this is what it looked like back in the day.
Somebody should of got the guys from Demon to take charge!
posted by rongorongo at 12:32 PM on January 3, 2017 [2 favorites]
...Somebody could write an interesting alternative history where some of the culture that had driven Turing at Bletchley Park had been capitalised to establish the UK as the global leader in computer technology: the first Digital exchange back in Highgate Wood in the 60s could have been rolled out rather than abandoned, we could be using the public key cryptography developed at GCHQ in 1973, and we'd be all be reading this on our "viewdata browsers" over a Donald Davis designed packet-switched network....
The problem was that the technology was miserably understood and exploited by the company's management - and the people who did understand had moved on or lurked in shadowy back rooms. In 1993 Martlesham Heath's several thousand R&D people connected to the internet on a single, paltry connection - and the company came close to losing the domain name "bt.com" because somebody in purchasing was complaining about the subscription cost. Prestel - again pretty much like Gopher - was closed down in 1994 just as the wordlwide web took off - this is what it looked like back in the day.
Somebody should of got the guys from Demon to take charge!
posted by rongorongo at 12:32 PM on January 3, 2017 [2 favorites]
Well, the guys from Demon... there are so many stories there, too, so many... and some of them are even printable. For example, the Church of England ran its email via Demon for a while, which was v. amusing. Founder Cliff Stanford's Wikipedia bio is entertaining enough but does absolutely no justice to the man's colourful post-Demon career...
BT's attitude to most new developments was to initially ignore them, then decry them, then see if it could charge a fortune for them - but only if they didn't threaten any of its existing revenue streams. If they did, then they must be killed. Despite Martlesham working with AT&T on developing ADSL, for example, BT was loath to actually deploy it, figuring (correctly) that it would decimate its leased-line business. (The same thinking had successfully marginalised ISDN, which could have given the whole country affordable 128kbps connectivity in the days when modems were lucky to do a tenth of that.) When BT did reluctantly deploy ADSL, it tried very hard to get people to use it as a gateway to walled-garden video services, shopping and so on (a sort of half-hearted super-Prestel), but even BT couldn't actually ban people from connecting to the Internet with it - since they'd never buy it otherwise - and the entire 'content offering', as I expect it was called, was roundly ignored and withered instantly.
And the advent of consumer broadband was what finally got the Internet into orbit, and the coming of affordable speedy mobile data/handsets took it interstellar.
(The ultimate driver for absolutely all of this? Moore's Law in DSPs.)
posted by Devonian at 1:35 PM on January 3, 2017 [2 favorites]
BT's attitude to most new developments was to initially ignore them, then decry them, then see if it could charge a fortune for them - but only if they didn't threaten any of its existing revenue streams. If they did, then they must be killed. Despite Martlesham working with AT&T on developing ADSL, for example, BT was loath to actually deploy it, figuring (correctly) that it would decimate its leased-line business. (The same thinking had successfully marginalised ISDN, which could have given the whole country affordable 128kbps connectivity in the days when modems were lucky to do a tenth of that.) When BT did reluctantly deploy ADSL, it tried very hard to get people to use it as a gateway to walled-garden video services, shopping and so on (a sort of half-hearted super-Prestel), but even BT couldn't actually ban people from connecting to the Internet with it - since they'd never buy it otherwise - and the entire 'content offering', as I expect it was called, was roundly ignored and withered instantly.
And the advent of consumer broadband was what finally got the Internet into orbit, and the coming of affordable speedy mobile data/handsets took it interstellar.
(The ultimate driver for absolutely all of this? Moore's Law in DSPs.)
posted by Devonian at 1:35 PM on January 3, 2017 [2 favorites]
So, in 1994 i was in 4th grade and I have vague memories of my dad (who's industry was relatively early adopters of the internet) talking about the benefits of Netscape over those old gopher clients that came with the ISP's "welcome to the internet" floppies. But aside from being on mefi I have no professional experience with the net.
But it seems like the entire history of the net has dominated by a over-arching trend to distributive processes over hierarchical/centralized. Beginning with packet switching up to Gopher vs the WWW, yahoo vs google, and more recently napster clones vs bit-torrent. Interesting article from one of those inflection points. I'm surprised it places as much emphasis on image support as opposed to power to freely organize without hierarchy.
posted by midmarch snowman at 6:36 PM on January 3, 2017
But it seems like the entire history of the net has dominated by a over-arching trend to distributive processes over hierarchical/centralized. Beginning with packet switching up to Gopher vs the WWW, yahoo vs google, and more recently napster clones vs bit-torrent. Interesting article from one of those inflection points. I'm surprised it places as much emphasis on image support as opposed to power to freely organize without hierarchy.
posted by midmarch snowman at 6:36 PM on January 3, 2017
In 1993 I had at least a 14.4 modem in my dorm room.
They were indeed heady days, as Devonian says.
(Not that anyone in this thread has asserted this): But I still don't think it's the biggest or most important change since Gutenberg. That is plumbing and clean water coming out of the tap and electricity.
Thanks for the UK Internet history lesson. I knew nothing about that. So many big important players missed early on on the Internet (over here: Apple and Microsoft, for instance).
posted by persona au gratin at 7:07 PM on January 3, 2017
They were indeed heady days, as Devonian says.
(Not that anyone in this thread has asserted this): But I still don't think it's the biggest or most important change since Gutenberg. That is plumbing and clean water coming out of the tap and electricity.
Thanks for the UK Internet history lesson. I knew nothing about that. So many big important players missed early on on the Internet (over here: Apple and Microsoft, for instance).
posted by persona au gratin at 7:07 PM on January 3, 2017
But it seems like the entire history of the net has dominated by a over-arching trend to distributive processes over hierarchical/centralized.
Yes - but equally there has been a very long running failure to understand and properly exploit distributive technologies. This starts off with the phone itself: here is a Scientific American article from 1881 which envisages telephones as being instruments by which one could dial up and listen to the opera - what other use could they possibly have! When SMS messaging came on the scene in the 1980s, it was seen as a way for network engineers to communicate with each other - or as a device for helping with optimization - nothing for "subscribers" to bother their heads with (much as Twitter started out as a tool for developers at Odeo to talk with each other). As Devonian says, the reaction of many telcos to the growth of the internet, was to envisage it as a route by which people might access a walled garden of content they would charge for. And the Gopher developers faced outrage from controllers of university mainframe systems - since now anybody could set themselves up as a source of information.
Some of this can be understood in terms of turkeys not wishing to vote for Christmas - but there is a very long history of organisations failing to properly understand (or just to suppress) the desire of people to talk and listen to each other without an intermediary getting in the way.
posted by rongorongo at 1:59 AM on January 4, 2017 [2 favorites]
Yes - but equally there has been a very long running failure to understand and properly exploit distributive technologies. This starts off with the phone itself: here is a Scientific American article from 1881 which envisages telephones as being instruments by which one could dial up and listen to the opera - what other use could they possibly have! When SMS messaging came on the scene in the 1980s, it was seen as a way for network engineers to communicate with each other - or as a device for helping with optimization - nothing for "subscribers" to bother their heads with (much as Twitter started out as a tool for developers at Odeo to talk with each other). As Devonian says, the reaction of many telcos to the growth of the internet, was to envisage it as a route by which people might access a walled garden of content they would charge for. And the Gopher developers faced outrage from controllers of university mainframe systems - since now anybody could set themselves up as a source of information.
Some of this can be understood in terms of turkeys not wishing to vote for Christmas - but there is a very long history of organisations failing to properly understand (or just to suppress) the desire of people to talk and listen to each other without an intermediary getting in the way.
posted by rongorongo at 1:59 AM on January 4, 2017 [2 favorites]
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Oh, good, it gets worse.
posted by Slap*Happy at 10:22 PM on January 1, 2017 [9 favorites]