[ih] Copy of first web page discovered

[Miles Fidelman]

Scott Brim wrote:
> On Friday, May 31, 2013, Miles Fidelman wrote:
>
>     And before gopher there were several CWISs (Campus Wide
>     Information System) varients - Cornell's CUINFO, MIT Techninfo,
>     Berkely Infocal (Z39.50 based, if I recall), a few others.   All
>     sort of proto-gophers if you will.
>
>
> Miles, I think those are a little different, in that they weren't 
> targeted for global information access.  Z39.50 maybe, but iirc it was 
> limited.

Well, a number of other sites picked up Techinfo (Penninfo comes to 
mind), and a little research just yielded this line from a status report 
on Penninfo: "The "Worldwide" command provides access to other CWISs on 
the Internet that use MIT's TechInfo protocol."

A little digging yielded this, on the "techinfo protocol" and a bit 
about Techinfo innards:
http://stuff.mit.edu/afs/net/project/attic/techinfo/src/xpenninfo/protocol.techinfo

The protocol had fairly granular addressing:
<node.id>:<Flags>:<Date>:<Topic>:<Title>:<Source>:<Locker>:<Path>
and I believe that menus could reference information on other servers,
so both federation and rudimentary hyperlinking were supported.

There was also Hytelnet - which provided a unified interface to all the 
various telnet-based library catalogs, CWISs, etc. A lot like gopher in 
that it's menus were extensible by dropping files into directories, and 
each file/menu entry is essentially a hyperlink to an information site, 
which can in turn reference other sites. Very gopherlike feel, too. 
(Nice working mockup of Hytelnet at 
http://www.floodgap.com/retrotech/hytelnet/gw)

Z39.50, at least as of a couple of years ago, is still the bases for 
federated search among library catalogs worldwide - "limited" is not the 
word I'd use.

-- 
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is.   .... Yogi Berra