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

[Larry Masinter]

> 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.

http 0.9 was essentially gopher: open a connection, GET the document in one
exchange, close the connection. One transaction per document/directory
list.  The complexity came from using multiple connections for a single
document with many embedded images rather than portable compound document
formats, moving the format complexity into the protocol.

As. a side note, adding  M. McCahill, University of Minnesota, (RFC 1436)
as an editor of RFC 1738 (URL) helped show the gopher community how to
preserve their investment in gopher servers while migrating to the web.
-- 
https://LarryMasinter.net  https://interlisp.org



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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