[ih] Fwd: [Dewayne-Net] The Rise and Fall of the Gopher Protocol

[Brian E Carpenter]

On 21/08/2016 09:10, Scott Brim wrote:
> Yes the history seems jumbled up but it's a fun read anyway.
> 
> On Mon, Aug 15, 2016 at 4:35 PM, Brian E Carpenter
> <brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> the 23rd Internet Engineering Task
>>> Force (IETF), an elite convocation of academics and government officials
>>> from around the world
>>
>> Um, no. If you look at the proceedings, academic and government officials were
>> far outnumbered by industry people. I won't comment on 'elite' ;-)
>>
>>> In the race to rule the internet, one observer noted,
>>> “Gopher seems to have won out.”
>>
>> Who, I wonder?

Actually, Google knows, although it wasn't said at IETF23:

http://iubio.bio.indiana.edu/soft/util/gopher/gophercon1.txt

"                      GopherCon '92: Trip report
                            Prentiss Riddle
                            riddle at rice.edu
                                8/17/92
...
Finally, the relative numeric success
of Gopher over WWW was discussed (there are orders of magnitude more
Gopher servers than WWW servers out there): Gopher seems to have won
out primarily because of the ease of entry (it's much harder to put up
a WWW server than a Gopher server), although another factor may be that
a hierarchical presentation is more appropriate than hypertext for the
broad-based audience of a CWIS."

   Brian

>> I no longer have my copies of The Matrix from that era, but sitting
>> at CERN we kept an eye on the growth curves for WAIS, Gopher and WWW and I don't
>> recall Gopher being a clear leader. Certainly, WWW didn't take over until Mosaic
>> was released, but after that it was no contest. The more interesting sessions
>> with TimBL at the IETF were after Mosaic.
>>
>> Regards
>>    Brian Carpenter
>