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

[John Day]

Committees and McGyvers achieve pretty much the same result. The major difference is it is “our result.”  The contrast is rather with a unifying vision that achieves simplifications, rather than accrues complexity, which the both do. The former on purpose to thwart their competitors, the latter more accidentally by short term action.


> On Sep 8, 2016, at 17:11, Jack Haverty <jack at 3kitty.org> wrote:
> 
> Yes, that might explain why there was a CGI at all; perhaps it was necessary in Tim's original vision as a means to make changes to documents, and then NCSA saw a way to use that CGI for accessing supercomputer data and created a browser to do it?  All speculation on my part; it would be good to hear from more of the people who were directly involved about what, and why, they did what they did...
> 
> IMHO, the History of The Internet is full of situations where a piece of technology was developed with one use in mind, and then adapted by someone else to use in a very different way.
> 
> The Internet was built by McGyvers, rather than by committees with piles of documents.
> 
> /Jack
> 
> 
> On 09/08/2016 01:11 PM, John Day wrote:
>> 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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>>