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

[John Levine]

>> 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.

Cello came out in 1993.  The Cornell LII started putting stuff on the
web in late 1992, and realized they needed a Windows browser for all
the lawyers using Windows, so LII founder Tom Bruce wrote one.  It
worked pretty well, but they abandoned it when Windows Mosaic came
along.

Cello handled embedded images and could play sound links.  It was much
easier to install on Windows 3.x than other browsers because it didn't
need as many external libraries.  I don't know how Tom did it because
although he is a smart guy, his background was in theatre production,
not technology.  I asked him once and he shrugged it off.  I guess
those Windows manuals were better than I'd realized.

R's,
John