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

[Brian E Carpenter]

On 08/09/2016 22:17, John Day wrote:
> 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.

I don't think we should forget that when Tim conceived the web (along with Robert
Cailliau, who gets less credit than he deserves), Tim's day job was to implement
remote procedure calls for data acquisition at CERN physics experiments. RPC of
course can support all those 6 operations. Without POST, the web wouldn't have been
able to, even in a primitive way.

[Robert and I introduced Tim to the concept of RPC in 1980, during his first
stint at CERN. Robert introduced him to document markup at that time, too.
There's a lot of detail in Robert's book, "How the Web Was Born: The Story
of the World Wide Web", James Gillies and Robert Cailliau, Oxford University
Press, 2000.]

   Brian

> 
> 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?  
> 
> (I am guessing that it was, and also to Jack’s point in the other email that the web worked at a finer granularity than Gopher.)
> 
> Take care,
> John
> 
>> On Sep 7, 2016, at 21:49, John Levine <johnl at iecc.com> 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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> 
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