Gopher lost out to WWW in part because Gopher was proprietary. The University of Minnesota owned the code and proposed to charge server owners for using it. Meanwhile Sir Tim over at CERN was handing out the original httpd under an MIT-style license.
There was some early work supporting things like forms and search on Gopher. But it was pretty much abandoned as soon as WWW started catching on.
that is interesting! I used to use gopher in the 80’s and while it was fine for ‘read the FAQ at this address’ it was awful for discovery and navigation in the pre mouse era was a real chore. When http came out we couldn’t get enough. There was a coffee machine that was online and it was so wild to check in on this coffee machine in some college real time. Gopher was fine it definitely wasn’t fun and rarely was it very interesting. The web was interesting from the get go.
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Gopher lost out to WWW in part because Gopher was proprietary. The University of Minnesota owned the code and proposed to charge server owners for using it. Meanwhile Sir Tim over at CERN was handing out the original
httpdunder an MIT-style license.There was some early work supporting things like forms and search on Gopher. But it was pretty much abandoned as soon as WWW started catching on.
University of Minnesota, my dude…software named for their mascot.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_(protocol)
that is interesting! I used to use gopher in the 80’s and while it was fine for ‘read the FAQ at this address’ it was awful for discovery and navigation in the pre mouse era was a real chore. When http came out we couldn’t get enough. There was a coffee machine that was online and it was so wild to check in on this coffee machine in some college real time. Gopher was fine it definitely wasn’t fun and rarely was it very interesting. The web was interesting from the get go.