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

[John R. Levine]

> It is reasonably clear that there are roughly 6 operations that can be performed remotely: create/delete, read/write, and start/stop.  Hence, one could get by with one application protocol using different “object models.” IOW, what is different about application protocols are the models they are applied to more than the protocol itself.
>
> Was the advantage of the web (and I think it probably was) that it was more easily adapted to that than Gopher and WAIS?  Were the object models too deeply embedded in the protocols to make them easily adaptable?  Or was it that someone wrote a browser for the web, rather than Gopher or WAIS?

The key difference wasn't the host->client protocol, it was that gopher 
only gave you a list of links, and the web gave you a page of HTML.  All 
gopher clients could do was show you the list of links and let you select 
one of them.  The later gopher+ could display a few media types such as 
pictures, but only the web could embed the links and later the other media 
in pages of text.

WAIS was just a text search engine, where you gave it some search terms 
and it gave you back a set of documents.  Again, that was easy to embed in 
the web, so it made little sense as a standalone service.

Regards,
John Levine, johnl at iecc.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies",
Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. https://jl.ly