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

[Dave Crocker]

On 9/7/2016 9:38 PM, Jack Haverty wrote:
> 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.


This gets at the larger set of functionality differences between the web 
and gopher.  Gopher was much easier to get started with, since it 
immediately was useful with existing (text) documents, of which there 
were many.  And initially the web really didn't work with text 
documents; everything was expected to be html.

But gopher's node-walking behavior and feature set were far more 
limited.  With gopher, there was no pay-off until the last click in the 
tree walk.  The web could give a 'reward' to the user for each click 
down the path, by way of allowing each intermediate node to have real 
content.  And it was multi-media, which, again, made for a much richer 
user experiences.  And as Jack notes, it had a means for invoking a 
back-end document-creation process on the fly.

The late 80s saw a variety of efforts to create basic search mechanisms, 
as well as better document-publishing mechanisms.  (For some reasons, 
average users found anonymous ftp to be cumbersome and inadequate.  No 
idea why...)

It was certain that both the search and publishing efforts would produce 
some successes.  IMO that was only a matter of time.  As for the details 
of the winners, well...

d/
-- 

   Dave Crocker
   Brandenburg InternetWorking
   bbiw.net