[ih] more gopher baroque, "The Internet runs on Proposed Standards"

[Jack Haverty]

IIRC, I didn't personally use gopher much, but I think it used 
character-based interfaces (e.g., the "Press ? for Help, q to Quit, u to 
go up a menuPage: 1/1" below.)

GUIs were becoming popular about that time, with "terminals" like SPARCs 
and Macs providing GUIs, and desktop PCs and Macs becoming common for 
non-techies.   Did the early web browsers (Mosaic etc.) run on PCs and 
Macs?   I don't recall the timing, but one of the advantages that the 
Web had might be the availability of the GUI instead of TTY-style 
interactions - even if all the documents being handled were just text.

I recall that I demonstrated the Web in the early 90s to everyone I 
could accost at Oracle, from the receptionist to the Chairman of the 
Board.   They all "got it" and thought it was promising even if there 
was little content online at the time.   Clicking on links was easy to 
learn.  Adding links to text documents was also simple to do in your 
favorite text editor.  Even simple formatting like headers, bold/italic, 
etc.  I never even thought of demonstrating gopher - it was suited for 
techies but not so much for normal people.

Jack Haverty

On 12/7/22 10:14, Olivier MJ Crépin-Leblond via Internet-history wrote:
>
>
> On 07/12/2022 05:14, John Levine via Internet-history wrote:
>> Gopher was just a bunch of menus and the later Gopher+ had a way to
>> say that the thing a menu entry pointed to was a picture or whatever.
>> Recall that the early WWW only had text links. In-line images were
>> Netscape's innovation.
>
> Gopher was pretty easy to administer and did the job really well on a 
> low bandwidth.
>
> For those who are nostalgic, here's a cut/paste from an old Gopher 
> page I did back in the day.
>
> Internet Gopher Information Client 2.0 pl10
>
> Directory Services
>
> -->1.About This Directory.
>
> 2.College Telephone Book (text)/
>
> 3.Connect to X.500 Directory <TEL>
>
> 4.Electronic Yellow Pages (Experimental) <TEL>
>
> 5.Finger to X.500 Services <?>
>
> 6.International Dialling Codes.
>
> 7.Internet "white pages" directory facility (Netfind) [Experime.. <TEL>
>
> 8.People's Locator on other sites (X.500 gateway)/
>
> 9.Search College Telephone Book <?>
>
> 10. Top level mail domains.
>
> 11. UK STD codes (long - nearly 8000 lines).
>
> 12. UK STD codes (string search) <?>
>
> 13. X500 Data Summary.
>
> 14. X500 Great Britain DIT statistics.
>
> Press ? for Help, q to Quit, u to go up a menuPage: 1/1
>
>
>
> As for text only WWW, Lynx was the oldest, and still is the oldest 
> text browser. But inline images were already possible with NCSA 
> Mosaic, Netscape's ancestor. NCSA Mosaic was widely used. I also have 
> screen shots of a very early version of NCSA Mosaic but this mailing 
> list does not support attachments.
> Kindest regards,
>
> Olivier