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

[Carl Malamud]

Agreed.

We initially ran our Securities and Exchange )SEC) server with ftp and
gopher. Added WAIS and Web after the fact. When gopher imposed a license I
didn’t quite understand (and no certainties on when/if additional terms
would be added) we dropped it.

On Tue, Apr 28, 2026 at 10:30 AM John Levine via Internet-history <
internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:

> 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
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