[ih] anybody know the history of the group at NCSA that developed Mosaic & HTTPd?

[Miles Fidelman]

On 3/11/18 9:35 PM, Dave Crocker wrote:

> On 3/11/2018 4:02 PM, Jack Haverty wrote:
>> But when the idea migrated elsewhere, starting probably with Mosaic, it
>> somehow lost the "producer" focus and became a mechanism primarily for
>> consuming material that was prepared in some 'offline' manner.
>
> Remember that for a time, gopher was very stiff competition for the web.
>
> Poor IPR and management policies by one side or the other, gopher had
> the major advantage of being usable with existing txt documents while
> the early web /required/ html and the tools for producing them were few
> and poor.  That gave gopher a much larger cache of documents to share.
> Initially.
>
> d/
>
Of course, from almost the beginning, Mosaic and future browsers 
supported gopher:: URLs.  I used to host a bunch of gopher servers, and 
when we did our project installing Internet in the Cambridge Public 
Library (1st ever, high speed Internet in a public library!!!) - we set 
up the machines with Mosaic as the primary GUI, with links to things 
like the WWW Public Library - but an awful lot of the resources we 
linked to were gopher servers.

Re. losing the "producer" flavor... a lot of that went away when Mozilla 
stopped shipping with a built in WYSIWYG web composer. But.. there was 
always the conflict that one had to have somewhere to "publish" stuff.  
In academia, that was often one's personal workstation, or the 
department server - but for everyone else, not a lot of people had write 
access to a gopher or web server.  Nowadays, laptops come with built in 
servers - but no composers, and it's kind of hard to publish from behind 
a NAT router.  Hosted WordPress seems to have become the vehicle for a 
rather huge amount of publishing to the web.

Miles



-- 
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is.  .... Yogi Berra