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

[Miles Fidelman]

On 8/20/16 7:55 PM, Brian E Carpenter wrote:
> On 21/08/2016 11:16, Miles Fidelman wrote:
>> I remember doing a few projects based on gopher - back in the early 1990s.
>>
>> I kind of wonder if the web would have just been one in a series of file
>> sharing technologies - progressing from FTP, to MIT Tech Info, to
>> Gopher, to the Web, to <something else> - if it had not been for Marc
>> Andreessen (Mosaic) and and Robert McCool (the NCSA deamon that became
>> Apache) at NCSA.
> I think another portable graphical browser would have come along soon enough.
> Tim's team was fixated on the NeXt for a while, but Unix workstations were
> rapidly becoming dominant in academia, so - without taking anything away from
> NCSA - somebody else would have done it, IMHO. Very possibly somebody at CERN,
> in fact.

Well, sure.  But would it have been based on HTML & HTTP?  What if UMich 
had open-sourced Gopher (which, I seem to recall, had a graphic browser 
at one point).  Or would someone have taken a next step?

Just a hypothetical, of course.

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