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It's the twentieth anniversary of two aspects of the Internet. Twenty years ago, two protocols were first published. One was called gopher, the other was called the World Wide Web.

If you'd been online in the early 90s, for those first couple of years you'd quite likely have thought gopher was going to win out. It had a quicker uptake, it was indexed, gopher space was searchable, it was elegant.

It's reckoned that the University of Minnesota, which invented the gopher protocol, irredeemably screwed up by putting a proprietorial license on it. Tim Berners Lee gave the World Wide Web an open license. Nobody wrote alternative gopher servers for fear of being charged royalties. Gopher to all intents and purposes died.

There are now somewhere over 300 million web sites in the world and perhaps a thousand gopher sites[1]. Actually finding a browser that will see them is about to become hard work, Firefox 4 is the last major browser to drop support for the protocol at which point those final thousand will become even less visible than they are at the moment. Cnet TV has a clip about it.

Look your last, while you can.

gopher://cb6.dyndns.org





[1] eta (for clarity regarding the estimate): some of which have multiple homepage accounts, of which most were created by bored students and remain empty.

And this is what the site looks like on a gopher client.

Attached files

The Internet itself was well established before gopher and the World Wide Web were thought up. The first email with an @ delimiter between recipient and computer name was sent in 1971 and by the mid-80s having an email account was commonplace for Internet users. The file transfer protocol originated in the same year. Newsgroups have a mid-80s origin. It amazes me how quickly the world has adopted them since these components were designed.

And I've found a web interface to the finger protocol! See, cool technology doesn't really die...

http://www-cgi.cs.cmu.edu/cgi-bin/finge ... dyndns.org

Nobody else sees an attraction in old protocols then, I can tell. Finger died out because people thought it gave away too much personal information, can you believe that? In this age of Facebook it's practically tight-lipped.

I defiantly like gopher too. It's efficient, it's visibly hierarchic instead of anarchic, and nobody can change the size of the fonts or the colour of the background between one site and another which is calming. The world wide web, by contrast, has a vile appearance.

Speaking of selecting the right well-honed tool for the job, I note Slackware's on Release Candidate 2 in the run-up to Slackware 13.37. The name of the new release suggests the geek brigade retains a sense of humour.

This thread is surprisingly uphill effort with nobody joining in, you know.