[ih] "How Gopher Nearly Won the Internet" Re: The Rise and Fall of the Gopher Protocol

[John Day]

Jack,

How much of this was the web and how much was the browser?  Had someone done a “browser” to Gopher or WAIS would that have made a difference?

Take care,
John


> On Sep 8, 2016, at 00:38, Jack Haverty <jack at 3kitty.org> wrote:
> 
> Well, I guess I have a view of that era of history from a different 
> direction.  So, as another input for the historians, here's what it 
> looked like to me back then.
> 
> In the 90s, I was "Internet Architect" at Oracle, and wasn't paying much 
> attention to the "lower layers" anymore, except as it applied to 
> building and operating our own internal corporate intranet.  Our 
> customers were database users, with a focus on business processes and 
> not much awareness of the communications layers.
> 
> I knew about Gopher, WAIS, et al, but they didn't seem particularly 
> useful to our customers.  As you might expect, the focus was on data, 
> and all of the data was in an Oracle database.   There wasn't any 
> obvious way to use Gopher or WAIS.  They were designed to help someone 
> find existing documents.  Databases typically create documents on the 
> fly - you specify in SQL how you want to look at your data and the 
> results are formatted and displayed on the screen or printer.   Apps on 
> your workstation/desktop/etc might connect to a database over a wire, or 
> a TCP connection, or a Novell SPX, etc., but that detail was mostly 
> hidden from the business users.
> 
> When I first encountered the Web, somewhere around 1992, it immediately 
> struck me as a new idea with lots of promise.  We had all been waiting 
> for a long time - 20+ years - for the next "killer app" to complement 
> the Telnet/FTP/Email workhorses.  The Web looked like maybe, finally, 
> possibly, "it".
> 
> I showed the web to everyone from the Chairman of the Board to the 
> receptionist in the lobby.  The ease of downloading the software made 
> this easy.   If we had to negotiate a license agreement, it never would 
> have happened.
> 
> The Web had two key features from a database perspective.  One was the 
> ability to have documents that "linked" to other documents in a very 
> unconstrained way.  So a report could have links to more detailed 
> information, related reports, etc.
> 
> But the most important ability was the CGI (IIRC that's what it was 
> called), the API and protocol which allowed a "document" to be retrieved 
> by calling some back-end program in the server, and even supplying 
> arguments to the call.   This meant that a "document" could also be 
> created on-the-fly by a clever program -- a perfect match to how 
> databases worked.
> 
> Of course the "forms" interface also meant that the user could become an 
> active participant in a session, with the ability not only to read data 
> presented from a server as documents, but also the ability to input data 
> and control the servers' actions.
> 
> As far as I remember, there was no such capability with Gopher or WAIS, 
> or maybe I just hadn't found it there.
> 
> In any event, these features meant that the Web, instead of just being a 
> clever way to organize and find documents, was also a new GUI (Graphical 
> User Interface) to interface to all sorts of database-backed 
> applications: order entry, billing, inventory control, etc., etc., etc. 
>  This was, to a database denizen, far more interesting than just the 
> ability to find previously prepared documents.
> 
> So, we built an interface between a web server and a database server, 
> and did *lots* of training to show anyone who would listen how to use 
> this new technology.  Most of the action at first was on customers' 
> intranets, so you probably didn't see it on the public Internet until 
> they got comfortable enough to put web servers online for their 
> customers, suppliers, etc. to use.
> 
> Oracle had a pretty broad reach even in the 1990s.  We joined W3C 
> immediately to have some influence on the technology.  I don't think 
> there was much interaction with the traditional Internet crowd (IETF 
> etc.) since they were focused on the lower layers.
> 
> Lots of trade shows, users' groups, and other venues in the database 
> universe got the word out.  I recall giving lots and lots of talks/demos 
> to various customer groups and it was pleasing to see the "light bulbs 
> go on" as they understood what they could do with this new technology in 
> their *existing* business systems.
> 
> Nobody ever even mentioned Gopher...
> 
> The rest as they say is history...   I have no idea how much this 
> activity affected Gopher's fate, or the Web's.  Some historian may 
> figure that out someday.
> 
> But it was a lot of fun...
> 
> Hope some historian finds this useful,
> /Jack Haverty
> 
> 
> On 09/07/2016 06:49 PM, John Levine wrote:
>>> ​Provocative quote in big letters:  “If it weren't for Gopher, the web
>>> probably would have died.” ​
>> 
>> Nice try.
>> 
>> Gopher was pretty cool for the early 1990s, but even if it hadn't had
>> a self-inflicted fatal wound when U of Minn wanted license fees, the
>> web would have won anyway.
>> 
>> When I wrote Internet for Dummies in 1993, I had roughly equal sized
>> chapters on Gopher, WWW, and WAIS.  At the time I thought WAIS was the
>> future, because full text search was so powerful.
>> 
>> I was right about search being powerful (see Google) but what I didn't
>> realize was that the web was general enough that it would absorb the
>> links from Gopher, the search from WAIS, the software archives from
>> FTP, and everything else.
>> 
>> R's,
>> John
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