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║                    How the Web ate Gopher                        ║
║                       October 1st 2024                           ║
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 I was reading this article today about the gopher protocol
 www.minnpost.com/business/2016/08/rise-and-fall-gopher-protocol 
 and I was fascinated to learn:
 
 1. The www was developed by TBL for places like CERN, Stanford, and
 the CIA, to distribute large cenralized troves of data.  While
 Gopher was developed by long haired 20 somethings at UofM, to be
 able to run servers on nearly any small computer. This made the
 admins at UofM so mad, that one admin stood in the middle of the
 room jumping up and down in pumps screaming, "you cant do that!"
 "you cant do that!". The UofM wanted the protocol to give them gate
 keeping control over everything that was moving across the internet,
 forcing traffic through mainframes. When it didnt, they tried to
 shut development down.
 
 2. The first gopher servers were named things like Danzig, Mudhoney,
 and Anthrax
 
 3. According to the developers of Gopher, the real reason www took
 off over gopher, was the simple fact that while gopher was 100 times
 better at organizing and making data available, www could serve ads
 and porn.
 
 4. The last stage of Gopher development was done in secret, hidden
 from the UofM administrators, and was released to the internet,
 becoming the first viral software release. People loved Gopher so
 much that when many of them started calling the U of M asking when
 new releases were coming, they pretended they had never tried to
 stop it, and instead tried to charge people for it, which wound up
 killing the project.
 
 5. The phrase "surf the web" was coined by the two original Gopher
 devs, one of whom was a windsurfer.
 
 6. Gopher devs claim that the eratic stream of conciousness hyperlink
 to hyperlink behavior of the www comes from the eratic thinking and
 personality of Tim Berners Lee, who naturally programmed how he
 thought into the protocol.
 
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  ]             ~ ~             |  
  |                            |   
   |                           |  

=> <-return home