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Where Have all the Gophers Gone? Why the Web beat Gopher in the Battle for Protocol Mind Share
Christopher (Cal) Lee
University of Michigan
School of Information
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Introduction
Brief Chronology
Potential Explanations
Conclusion
References
Revision History
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Introduction
In this paper, I explore the rise and fall of Gopher as the dominant protocol for file search and retrieval over the Internet. After its creation in 1991 at the University of Minnesota, use of Gopher exploded. The popular press lauded it as an important step beyond File Transfer Protocol (FTP), in terms of both usability and ease of implementation. The growth of Gopher was soon overshadowed, however, by the World Wide Web. A major milestone is this direction was the release of the Mosaic graphical browser by the University of Illinois National Center for Supercomputing Applications [NCSA] in 1993.
The popular media were soon describing Gopher as an obsolete predecessor to the Web, rather than one of the protocols available along with Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) through most browsers. By juxtaposing today's Web with today's Gopher, it is easy to come to a technologically determinist conclusion about the reason for Gopher's seeming demise. Searching the Web through an engine like Alta Vista using Netscape Communicator 4.5 or Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.0, for example, is much more effective in most cases than trying to conduct the same search in Gopherspace through that same browser or even using a dedicated Gopher client. But the current technological situation was not inevitable. The superiority of the early text-based Web over its Gopherspace contemporary was by no means obvious.
I investigate potential explanations for the rise and fall of Gopher. Why is Gopher not commonly used as a protocol for corporate intranets? Why have most libraries abandoned their efforts to maintain a presence in Gopherspace? Why have so few people heard of HyperGopher or Gopher+, yet the popular technology press makes front-page news out of almost every minute advancement related to Web browsers, HTTP and HTML? In an attempt to provide at least partial answers to these questions, I use Requests for Comments (RFCs), project documents (such as FAQs and publicly posted email messages), and published interviews with the developers of both HTTP and Gopher; and popular literature (information science professional magazines and journals being heavily represented) from 1991 to the present that reflects the media's position on Gopher.
I explain the relationship between Gopher and the Web in terms of their "mind share." This is a phrase that has recently come into use within discussions of electronic commerce and online services. In contrast to market share, which measures how many people are buying a firm's products or services, mind share represents how strong a presence those products or services have in the minds of consumers. As I interpret it, mind share can be seen as a superset of the long-standing concept of "branding," which recognizes that products with a well-recognized name (e.g. CocaCola) are worth more than lesser-known products, even if the products themselves are objectively of equal value.
In addition to brand name, many other intangible factors can make up a product's or service's mind share advantage. A Web portal, for example, that can "get more eyeballs" than its competitors is said to have a mind share advantage. This could take the form of name recognition, URL recognition, use by many people as the default "home page" when exploring the Internet, presence in many people's bookmark lists, links from other Web sites, references in other popular media, and technological interoperability with other popular online resources. In psychological terms, mind share can be roughly defined as the attentional resources a product or service has at its disposal. While there is a great deal of debate about whether or not such mind share can actually translate into profitability over time [Wilson], the phenomenon itself is widely recognized. It is often difficult to pin down the specific reasons why one Web site, company, technology or system manages to gain mind share while others lose it. This paper wi
ll first lay out the story of Gopher's rapid gain and loss of mind share, and then explore some reasons why this may have occurred.
Brief Chronology
Just as with human communication, computers need a common set of conventions in order to share information. The history of networked computing is rich with stories about developing protocols. The following table provides a few of the early protocols used to network computers.
Protocol Name = Date = Purpose :
Telnet = 1969 = Largely a proof of concept for the ARPANET project. Allowed users to remotely emulate the terminal of another computer.
Network Control Protocol (NCP) = 1969 = Allowed sharing of resources between computers that went beyond simple terminal emulation.
File Transfer Protocol (FTP) = 1972 = Files could be shared remotely.
Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) = 1975 = Allowed resource sharing between networks other than the ARPANET.
Internet Protocol (IP) = 1978 = Separated some of the networking functionality (e.g. transfer acknowledgment) from the simple act of passing packets.
TCP/IP was official adopted by the ARPANET in January of 1983 in order to allow interchange between the ARPANET and other networks around the world. As with protocols used in human negotiations, the development and selection of protocols for information interchange between computers often turns political, as in the email "header wars" that took place in 1975 and those between TCP/IP and OSI in the 1980s. [Hafner and Lyon]
After the above protocols were well established, allowing efficient and reliable interchange between heterogenous computing environments, a further step was to make this interchange understandable to less techno-savvy end users. A major advance in this direction was distributed filing, which allowed users in various locations, using various computer platforms to share a common file structure for interchange. The Network Filing System (NFS), developed in 1984 by Sun Microsystems, was designed as a distributed file system to provide "transparent" file services between heterogeneous UNIX environments. It allowed users to mount remote directories and disks so that they appeared as local drives, so that they could share access to both files and printers. [Digital Equipment Corporation]
The Andrew File System (AFS) was a similar system, developed by Carnegie Mellon University the same year. It was used to provide a campus-wide file system for home directories which would run effectively using a limited bandwidth campus backbone network. In 1989, the Transarc company was formed to evolve the Andrew File System into a commercial product.
Networked filing systems, however, still required a user to understand and navigate the filing system of the network. This imposed a considerable burden, not only because file hierarchies are a limited tool for resource discovery (a file can generally be put in only one place), but also because the people who set up the file hierarchies were generally experienced computer administrators, who organized resources in a way that was often confusing to an inexperienced user. In 1990, Alan Emtage at McGill University in Montreal invented Archie, which helped to address these concerns. Archie searched and indexed files that were available on the Internet through FTP. This was a major boon for users. Instead of having to identify the FTP site that might be appropriate and then negotiate its file structure, they could query the Archie index to look for files of interest. Archie made the identification of useful files much easier, but it still had some serious limitations. Not only were files indexed by file name, whi
ch was often uninformative, but users still needed to know how to deal with FTP directories and client software once they decided to retrieve the files they had identified through Archie.
The development of Gopher was a local response to this general problem. In 1991, the University of Minnesota wanted a simple menu system to provide access to files and information on campus through their local network. A debate followed between those advocating a mainframe model and those who preferred a client-server architecture. The mainframe adherents were winning the debate initially, but the client-server advocates said they could develop a prototype much more quickly and they were given the go-ahead to do so. Bob Alberti, Farhad Anklesaria, Paul Linder, Mark MacCahill and Daniel Torry at the Microcomputer and Workstation Networks Center unleashed Gopher (named after the University of Minnesota mascot, the Golden Gopher) on the world later that same year. The system was composed of server software, client software and the protocol that allowed the two to communicate.
Users could have a Gopher client application running on their own computer or use Telnet to log into a server, then use the Gopher client program that resided on that server. At first there were two types of files, menus and text documents. The menus were also ASCII text files but they conformed to a specific comma-delimited format. They provided pointers to documents, other menus, or services (such as WAIS) that allowed for text-based searching. This architecture allowed users to browse up and down the hierarchy of files, looking for files that interested them. Like all other Internet clients of the time, Gopher had a command line interface, using arrow keys and characters to represent functions. Generally, / at end of line meant another menu, period meant text file, <TEL> meant Telnet session and <?> meant a searchable database. Many additional key commands were also available, but varied greatly from one client to another.
Internet Gopher Information Client v1.12
Root gopher server: gopher.tc.umn.edu
--> 1. Information About Gopher/
2. Computer Information/
3. Internet file server (ftp) sites/
4. Fun & Games/
5. Libraries/
6. Mailing Lists/
7. UofM Campus Information/
8. News/
9. Other Gopher and Information Servers/
10. Phone Books/
11. Search lots of places at the U of M <?>
Press ? for Help, q to Quit, u to go up a menu Page:1/1
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One of the greats appeals of Gopher was that an end user did not have to know about the nuts and bolts of the protocol in order to navigate effectively. The other protocols and tools mentioned above made important steps in this direction, by allowing organizations to share files between platforms and without regard to specific computer architectures, but they still required a familiarity with the directory structure and the tools (generally FTP and Telnet) used to negotiate it. Gopher took transparency to a higher level, since visitors to a Gopher site did not need to know the specific file name or even the host and path name on the computer where a file was located in order to retrieve it. One would simply type or click on a number to select the menu he or she wanted, and Gopher would take care of dealing with the details of computer architecture. Not only were the barriers to entry very low in terms of learning the system, but they were also quite low technologically. Both the client and server software we
re compact and easy enough to install that a wide range of computer users could begin to use the Internet, who had previously found it too intimidating, time consuming, or expensive. What began as a Campus Wide Information System (CWIS) soon became Gopherspace, a virtual realm visited by thousands of people around the world.