[ih] The web as wind and whirlwind? (was Re: History from 1960s to 2025)

[John Levine]

It appears that Dave Crocker via Internet-history <dcrocker at bbiw.net> said:
>On 12/22/2025 7:21 PM, John Levine via Internet-history wrote:
>> Gopher might have been a serious competitor if UofM hadn't made the
>> fatal mistake of trying to charge for it.
>
>Gopher was markedly easier to start publishing with, but had a very 
>constrained experience model.

>1. As I recall, it was text only, with no extensible object potential.  
>I didn't look at the protocol, so I don't know whether it had a 
>provision for alternative object types.

>2. My understanding was that while gopher supported a directed graph 
>access, it did not enable display of content until reaching the leaf.  

Gopher had menus and pages. The menus were text menus but in Gopher+
the pages could be of many types including pictures, PDF, and movles.
It wasn't as good as the web but it was a lot easier to set up on
small slow computers and a lot snappier since the menus were very
compact.

>The web permits output of content anywhere along a sequence.  This is 
>not a trivial benefit, in terms of UX.

My recollection is that the early web was text and links, like Ted
Nelson's hypertext.  The embedded images were added a few years
later in Mosaic.

R's,
John