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

[Miles Fidelman]

There were graphical Gopher browsers, and for a long time Mosaic 
supported Gopher (maybe WAIS too).  Maybe Mozilla still does.

Back in my Center for Civic Networking days, we published a lot of our 
early materials on gopher, and then had a long period of overlap when we 
published on both gopher and http.  When we did public access in the 
Cambridge Public Library, we had Mosaic fronting both gopher & web sources.

On the other hand - I'm convinced that, if it weren't for Mosaic and the 
NCSA daemon, something would have come along to replace the web.

Miles


On 9/8/16 6:19 AM, John Day wrote:
> 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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