[ih] Internet analyses (Was Re: IPv8...)

[John Levine]

It appears that John Gilmore via Internet-history <gnu at toad.com> said:
>DARPA got exactly what they wanted from their contract with Berkeley --
>broad, rapid adoption of TCP/IP in their research community.  That would
>not have happened if they had paid the same amount but had asked
>Berkeley to license the results through a proprietary company.

Gopher was (is?) a similar cautionary tale. It was a good design and
although it was a lot less flexible than the web, it was also a lot
easier to implement and loaded the servers less. In the 1993 first
edition of Internet for Dummies, Gopher and the Web each got a chapter
of about the same length.

Then U of Minnesota decided that they would charge a licensning fee
for their Gopher server, and that was it. It disappeared while the Web
became, well, the Web.

R's,
John