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

[John Day]

One quarter we haven’t heard from are those who actually created it:  the web or the browser.  

One of the reasons NCSA was interested in creating a browser was that they were interested in the visualization/management of data to and from supercomputing problems. To some extent, the browser was intended to address their data management and visualization needs.


> On Sep 8, 2016, at 15:30, Jack Haverty <jack at 3kitty.org> wrote:
> 
> IIRC, the availability of a browser was necessary, but just one part of 
> the story.
> 
> If you put a web server online, it wasn't very useful unless there was a 
> way to use it.   Yes, you could connect to port 80 and type "GET xxx" 
> but even techie nerds would find that tedious.   So, when I think of the 
> early web, it includes the browser client as well as the server as 
> critical elements.
> 
> Gopher provided a slightly more friendly user interface than 
> tried-and-true FTP, and an index/search capability, but it was still 
> text-based.   That was fine for us techie nerds, but it wasn't exciting 
> to all the non-techie users sitting in front of PCs and used to 
> somewhat-graphical applications.
> 
> Besides, we techies had all become quite comfortable using FTP, and the 
> "README" convention as a poor-man's index, for a decade or two.  By the 
> 90s NFS/SMB/Netware/Appletalk/etc made it much easier to have a "public" 
> repository (although AFAIK mostly on intranets) seamlessly integrated 
> into our computing environments.  Sales stuff was on the "SALES" server, 
> technical info on "ENGRNG", etc.  You didn't even know you were using 
> the network.
> 
> In the broader world, even non-tech businesses had similar internal 
> systems, often a hodgepodge of proprietary environments.  They also 
> typically had "document management" systems, which kept track of 
> corporate documents and usually included capabilities beyond 
> index/search/retrieval.  In a business environment, you often need 
> mechanisms like review/approval, distribution lists, version management, 
> etc.
> 
> So, as a document search/retrieval system, in the early 90s, Gopher was 
> interesting, but at best just an incremental improvement to existing 
> mechanisms, with no obvious way to integrate it with those mechanisms.
> 
> -----
> 
> As I recall, Tim B-L's original idea for the web was a sort of 
> collaborative notebook, where people could create and change documents, 
> and link them together, as well as read them.  There was no "search" per 
> se.
> 
> But the initial thrust of the browser was to view the web as a read-only 
> system - you could "browse" an existing melange of documents, and set 
> bookmarks to help find them again.  No way (that I could see) in the 
> browser to make any changes to documents, new documents, etc.
> 
> So the first days of the Web started with slightly-dynamic documents 
> (Tim's collaborative notebook vision), and with the advent of the 
> browser regressed to being primarily a static document repository 
> (browsers and servers, with documents created externally).
> 
> People quickly started producing indices of what was on the Web.  When I 
> first encountered Yahoo, it advertised itself as "Yet Another 
> Hierarchical Officious Organizer" and was essentially a Gopher-like 
> index tree of interesting websites, one of many.  For a while, I 
> maintained a similar in-house list of interesting websites out on the 
> public Internet, and made it available within the company, along with 
> instructions on how to get browsers and servers.   As people in various 
> departments inside the company put up their own webservers, my list of 
> interesting Internet pages was expanded to include a list of interesting 
> intranet pages.   Search engines like AltaVista came along too.
> 
> All of this could probably have been done with Gopher.   But it wasn't.
> 
> The ease of getting the Web server and browser running, and of creating 
> simple linked-document internal corporate webs, and the ability to 
> create user-friendly documents with rich linking and formatting, all 
> helped push the Web forward.
> 
> Gopher (IIRC) provided none of these, and no obvious way to integrate 
> Gopher into any of the existing systems.  At least I didn't run across 
> anyone who had done it.
> 
> -----
> 
> None of this was "mainstream" technology at the time; no one was using 
> the web as a primary component of their business IT machinery.   I think 
> the CGI was at least one of the primary elements that moved the web to 
> dominance.
> 
> At the time, Microsoft had a catchphrase "Where Do You Want To Go 
> Today?" or something like that.  It reflected the "browser" perspective 
> of the web as a library or document repository. It was interesting to 
> browse the virtual aisles, find an interesting thing to read, and go to 
> investigate whatever you found there.
> 
> I gave a lot of talks/demos using the next-generation catchphrase "What 
> Do You Want To Do Today?" as a theme.  The CGI made that possible. 
> Instead of just browsing documents, you could have the server do 
> something, and create a document on the fly to show you the results of 
> whatever it did.   That document could have links that did something 
> else, and forms that allowed the user to pass parameters in to guide 
> that activity.
> 
> Instead of just browsing, a user could now actually cause that remote 
> server to do stuff.  Essentially, the Web browser, with CGI, had become 
> a new universal GUI - graphical user interface, with a new API that 
> could be linked to any kind of program behind any server on any kind of 
> computer -- in effect a universal standard RPC mechanism that could be 
> used to access programs on any kind of computer that you could get a web 
> server on.
> 
> Of course, some of this had been done ages before -- e.g., the Coke 
> machine on the ARPANET.  But in the 90s the WWW made it now easy with 
> the key components pre-installed, freely distributed, and mostly free 
> (IIRC, the early browser cost just $25 or something like that - a 
> bargain compared to typical software costs of the era for all those PCs 
> out there).
> 
> In business, government, and other parts of the "real world", computers 
> are used to do stuff.  As techies, we understood that, but I think all 
> we really understood was using computers to write code, and maybe an 
> occasional document or two.  Telnet was good enough to get to that far 
> away computer.  FTP was good enough to move code and RFCs around.  Email 
> was good enough to hold endless debates until someone finally wrote the 
> code.
> 
> Non-techies use computers for other things - order entry, market 
> research, inventory control, shipping tracking, customer support, etc., 
> etc.   Much of that activity involves interacting with databases of some 
> kind.  So the web technology, integrated with databases through CGI, 
> suddenly provided a whole new way of doing all those activities, and 
> could be deployed without the massive disruptions often required to 
> introduce new systems.
> 
> Security was also a concern of course.  With the web technology, 
> businesses, their customers, and their suppliers could all be 
> interconnected through carefully structured web portals into their 
> various internal business computers.   Their various intranets would be 
> connected and even use the Internet to do so, but without the risk and 
> exposure of IP-level router interconnections.
> 
> Done carefully, web servers act as firewalls so that users could only do 
> what they should be able to do.  A web server is essentially a "router" 
> interconnecting two organizations or customers, but the "connectivity" 
> is not for IP packets.  Rather, connectivity is limited to a set of 
> activities that can be performed through that connection.
> 
> I can order a book from Amazon through the web, but I can't cause Amazon 
> to order 10,000 copies of a book I wrote - assuming their webserver 
> designer didn't make that function accessible through a public CGI.
> 
> I can interact with a computer deep within a corporation, but I can (if 
> they're careful) only do certain things that they want me to do.  I most 
> likely can't "ping" that computer, or open an FTP connection to it.  But 
> I can use it.
> 
> The Web has enabled an internet of internets, with computers able to 
> interact across public and corporate boundaries.  "On the Internet" has 
> a new meaning (Dave, time for an update to that RFC...)
> 
> The CGI made that feasible.  As I explained this to customers - usually 
> non-techie managers in non-tech companies - you could see the "light 
> bulbs" as they realized how the web technology could be used in their 
> business interactions - not just to browse and read documents but to do 
> the various activities involved in commerce, internally as well as with 
> their customers and business partners.   That was a very potent attraction.
> 
> -----
> 
> I imagine all of the above could have been done with a continuous 
> evolution of Gopher.  But it wasn't.  The WWW "won" because people took 
> the base technology of the early web, figured out how to use it in their 
> own world, and just did it.   Rough consensus and running code...!
> 
> The 90s were interesting times....
> /Jack Haverty
> 
> 
> 
> 
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