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

[Brian E Carpenter]

On 23-Dec-25 16:45, John Levine via Internet-history wrote:
> 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.

I think the Next version had images, but of course most people didn't
have Nexts. Mosaic + X terminals added images for many people. I know
I first saw images on Mosaic and an NCD, demonstrated personally by Tim.
But it was POST dialogue boxes and radio buttons that really grabbed me,
because we had an immediate application: users registering devices and
requesting an IP address; this was before DHCP was deployable. I wrote
the HTML and a colleague (Jean-Michel Jouanigot) wrote the CGI script.
So anyone who added a device to the network had to use Mosaic.

     Brian

> 
> R's,
> John