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

[Brian E Carpenter]

I wrote:

>I remember a public argument between Tim BL and Hermann Maurer*
> (of Hyper-G fame)
...
> *My memory says it was Maurer. Some Google hints suggest that it was his
> student Frank Kappe.

It was Kappe, and in 1994, after the release of Mosaic. I found the issue of
the CERN weekly bulletin announcing the seminar:

"Wednesday 14 September
COMPUTING SEMINAR
at 16.00 hrs - CN Auditorium
bldg 31/3-005
Hyper-G : Better than WWW
by Frank KAPPE / Institute for Information Processing
and Computer Based new Media (IICM), Graz
University of Technology"

Regards
   Brian Carpenter

On 21/08/2016 16:47, Brian E Carpenter wrote:
> On 21/08/2016 14:54, Dave Crocker wrote:
>> On 8/20/2016 6:31 PM, Brian E Carpenter wrote:
>>> In fact, hypertext
>>> specialists thought it was broken; 
> 
> The academics working on hypertext thought that a hypertext system
> without bidirectional links and some kind of continuous completeness
> checking (so that dead links would vanish automatically) wasn't
> useful. I remember a public argument between Tim BL and Hermann Maurer*
> (of Hyper-G fame) about this - I can't put an exact date on it, but
> it was when Hermann gave a seminar  about Hyper-G at CERN and I'm
> guessing it was in 1993/94. (Maurer's later writings assert that Hyper-G
> was built on WWW experience, but my recollection is that if so, that
> can refer only to the very early pre-Mosaic web.)
> 
> Tim made a very strong argument that a system with bidirectional links
> and consistency checks was undeployable at large scale, and of course
> he was right.
> 
> *My memory says it was Maurer. Some Google hints suggest that it was his
> student Frank Kappe.
> 
> All the same, Maurer wrote in late 1994:
> 'So is WWW the answer we all have been waiting for? Unfortunately, the answer is
> again a clear: "NO".'
> (elib.zib.de/pub/Workshops/TU_Berlin_1995/Maurer/Maurer.ps)
> 
> Apparently, the Microcosm people at the University of Southampton had similar
> criticisms of the WWW design.
> 
>>> distributed systems designers thought it
>>> was broken. 
> 
> In particular, they thought POST was broken because it didn't offer transactional
> integrity. And they still do, I think. Google "RESTful considered harmful."
> Or think about how disasters like XML-RPC and SOAP arose.
> 
>     Brian
> 
>>> I suppose gopher was the same. This flatness actually made deployment
>>> a great deal easier.
>>
>>
>> No doubt I wasn't tracking any of this closely enough, but I don't 
>> recall hearing those complaints.
>>
>> But then, my framework for such things was thoroughly imprinted by 
>> having gotten access and becoming a longtime user of the Engelbart NLS 
>> system, starting in 1972.  (My start; the system itself dated back to 
>> the 60s.)
>>
>> It had the same, at-will, direct, inter-document linking (albeit not 
>> inter-machine).  Any place in any document could include a link to any 
>> other labeled/numbered place in any other document.
> 
>