The rise and fall of the Gopher protocol
[From https://www.minnpost.com/business/2016/08/rise-and-fall-gopher-protocol]
By Tim Gihring | 08/11/16
It was mid-March 1992, and Mark McCahill had never been to San Diego
before. Back home in Minneapolis, the skies had been dumping snow for
six months, and would keep at it for several more weeks. McCahill
checked into the Hyatt Islandia, an 18-story high-rise hotel
overlooking Mission Bay. “There were palm trees," he recalls. "Boy, was
it nice."
McCahill was then in his mid-30s and managing the Microcomputer Center
at the University of Minnesota–Twin Cities, which facilitated the
emerging use of personal computers on campus. He and Farhad
Anklesaria, a programmer in the center, had been invited to address the
23rd Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), an elite convocation of
academics and government officials from around the world who were
literally deciding how the internet should work.
"The gods of the internet," McCahill says, though in other circles they
would have gone unnoticed. In his memoirs, another internet pioneer,
Tim Berners-Lee, describes these gatherings as "people in T-shirts and
jeans, and at times no footwear. They would meet in different small
rooms and talk excitedly."
The internet then, as now, was a vast array of information stored in
random computers around the world, only there was no easy or consistent
access. It was difficult even to discover what was out there - there
were no good search engines. The most popular protocol, or method of
retrieving information from another computer, was FTP (file transfer
protocol), the primitive, labor-intensive equivalent of knocking on
someone’s door and asking if you could carry away his piano.
The IETF had been convening since 1986 to iron out these issues, which
had prevented the internet from becoming the "Intergalactic Network"
its originators had foreseen, instead remaining the limited domain of
physicists and the military. But this meeting felt different. For the
first time, the internet seemed on the verge of going public.
On March 18, in a conference room of the hotel, Berners-Lee presented
one possible breakthrough: the World Wide Web. It was evening. Many of
the 530 conference attendees had already gone to the bar or to dinner.
To the curious who stayed behind, Berners-Lee explained that the Web
could be used to connect all the information on the internet through
hyperlinks. You could click on a word or a phrase in a document and
immediately retrieve a related document, click again on a phrase in
that document, and so on. It acted like a web laid over the internet,
so you could spider from one source of information to another on nearly
invisible threads.
Two other programs with the potential to expand access to the internet
- WAIS and Prospero - were discussed in the same session. In the
reports of people who saw the presentation, the Web did not come across
as the best of them, or even as particularly promising.
The next day, in the light of the afternoon, McCahill and Anklesaria
presented the Internet Gopher. It was simple enough to explain: With
minimal computer knowledge, you could download an interface - the
Gopher - and begin searching the internet, retrieving information
linked to it from anywhere in the world. It was like the Web but more
straightforward, and it was already working.
In fact, most attendees needed little introduction to Gopher - the
software had been out for months. It was the developers they were
curious about, the Minnesotans who had created the first popular means
of accessing the internet. "People we'd never met were telling us how
they were using our stuff and adding things to it," McCahill says. "We
had no idea how big Gopher was going to be until we experienced this
firsthand and realized that growth could be exponential for a while."
In the years that followed, the future seemed obvious. The number of
Gopher users expanded at orders of magnitude more than the World Wide
Web. Gopher developers held gatherings around the country, called
GopherCons, and issued a Gopher T-shirt - worn by MTV veejay Adam Curry
when he announced the network's Gopher site. The White House revealed
its Gopher site on Good Morning America. In the race to rule the
internet, one observer noted, "Gopher seems to have won out."
McCahill's father was an executive for Conoco, the oil company, which
moved him around the country about every two years. McCahill was in
junior high when the family finally settled in the Twin Cities. He
graduated from the U in 1979 with a BA in chemistry, spent a year
studying effluent in rivers, and realized he liked the computer
analysis ("heavy number smashing") more than the chemistry itself
("kind of dirty"). So he took a job in the U's Microcomputer Center,
programming some of Apple's first personal computers.
The Twin Cities were a proto-Silicon Valley then, with a long history
of producing some of the world's most powerful computers at UNIVAC,
Control Data Corporation, and Engineering Research Associates, which
supported the work of Honeywell, IBM, and other local tech firms. The
Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium, or MECC, formed in 1973 to
get computers in schools and created software for them - most famously
The Oregon Trail. By the early 1980s, when only a fraction of schools
in neighboring states had computers, there were about three or four in
every public school in Minnesota.
When McCahill began working in the Microcomputer Center, a turf battle
was heating up - "a religious war," McCahill calls it - between "the
high priests of computing" who oversaw the U's venerable mainframes,
the enormous machines that once occupied entire rooms, and the growing
cadre of personal-computer converts. "Microcomputer guys were as far
out of the mainstream as you could get and still be a part of the U's
computer center," McCahill says. Anklesaria, who had earned a doctorate
in genetics before gravitating to computer science, says the
Microcomputer Center was "a splinter group" when he joined in late
1987. "The mainframe was still the only thing - the Mac was considered
a toy."
McCahill sided with PCs. "The idea of democratizing access to
computing, putting computers in the hands of everyday people - that
resonated with me, and that was part of all the early PC stuff," he
says. "If you were interested in PCs, you just absorbed that attitude
by osmosis. It was in the air and the water."
McCahill, who had long hair then that he now pulls into a ponytail,
spent his free time wind-surfing on Lake Calhoun, and says the PC
revolution "looked like a good wave to ride ... it would enable me to do
what I've tried to do ever since: take technology that is cutting edge
and get it to the point that it's palatable to mom and dad and English
majors."
In the late 1980s, McCahill and Anklesaria developed the first popular
internet email system, called POPMail. "It was partly for selfish
reasons," McCahill says. "I wanted more people using email so I didn't
have to walk down the hall to my mailbox to collect my phone messages
on little slips of paper." Instead, secretaries could send an email.
For that matter, so could callers.
At the same time, the U was determined to network its computers on the
internet in a so-called campus-wide information system, or CWIS, and
the schism was delaying development. By early 1991, a committee of more
than 20 department heads and computing specialists had been meeting for
months, producing a long list of demands - including the use of
mainframe computers - but zero code. "They had some complicated shit
for doing searches that I didn't want to do," McCahill says. "Farhad
didn't want to write it at all."
"But I had to show something," Anklesaria says. So he stripped the
program down to its simplest parts - a basic protocol for making
information in one place available somewhere else. He cobbled it
together on a Mac, writing a server (a program enabling a computer to
"serve up" requested files) and a client (how most of our computers are
programmed, enabled to search for and request those files). "And I
said, 'This stuff kind of works.' Since we had nothing else, we went
for it."
McCahill pushed for a full-text search engine - something we now take
for granted - and borrowed the gist of one from a computer system
called NeXT, which had recently been invented by Steve Jobs. "We had
this marriage of Farhad's super-simple protocol for saying give me a
list of items, a menu," says McCahill, "and my thing of having a way of
searching, and we glued those two together."
It was plain text - no pictures, given that modem speeds were so slow.
And it was organized like the one information source most people alive
in the early 1990s were familiar with: a library, with similar subjects
grouped together. You just pointed your gopher, as the lingo went, to
any Gopher site you wanted to explore, and there you were, burrowing
through the internet. It was so simple that just about anyone could
make it work, even an English major.
"It was one of the rare times when we both looked at each other and
said, 'Holy shit, we've got a really good idea here,'" McCahill
recalls. Anklesaria called it the Internet Gopher, a triple play on
words: the U's mascot, a critter that digs, and a go-fer - one who
fetches. "We figured that if we called it Gopher, the committee
couldn't complain," McCahill says. "It's the school mascot!"
Sir Tim Berners-Lee - he was knighted in 2004 - was born in London in
1955, less than a year before McCahill. His parents were both
mathematicians. While McCahill's father was being shipped from Colorado
to Oklahoma to Minnesota, Sir Tim's parents were developing the world's
first commercially available computer.
Berners-Lee grew up with the internet, or at least the concept of it.
As a child, he built mock computers out of cardboard boxes. He came
home from high school one day to find his father writing a speech on
how computers might someday make intuitive connections, linking
information the way the brain uses random associations to link
thoughts.
He was a teenager when the internet began as the ARPAnet, connecting a
handful of computers at Stanford and other universities. It was
designed as a defense, a secure means of communication should the
Soviets destroy the American telephone system, though its practical
purpose was to allow scientists to use the computing power at another
facility for massive calculations.
Berners-Lee earned a degree in physics from Oxford - where he built his
first computer with parts from an old television, a calculator, an
electronics kit, and a car battery - then worked as a software engineer
for a few years before taking a job with CERN, the famous
particle-physics lab in Geneva, Switzerland. By then, in 1984, the
internet had gone global; CERN was the largest internet node in Europe.
Yet using the internet was problematic even within the CERN lab. When
you wanted information, Berners-Lee later recalled, "often it was just
easier to go ask people while they were having coffee." He decided he
could do better. He had never forgotten his father's research on the
brain, and when he wove the Web, it was based on this holistic,
serendipitous, strangely rewarding experience of surfing from one
vaguely related idea to the next.
He finished a model of the Web in 1989, but for years it went nowhere.
The concept was too abstract and it only worked on NeXT computers. But
in early 1991, just as McCahill and Anklesaria were conceiving the
Internet Gopher in Minnesota, the first Web servers outside of CERN
were switched on.
After outlining the Gopher protocol, McCahill and Anklesaria pulled
together four programmers who worked in the Microcomputer Center to
write the software. McCahill wanted it in a hurry. Not because he was
racing Berners-Lee, but because he wanted it over with. He wanted it
before the next CWIS committee meeting, in a month.
The programmers were young guys, mostly in their 20s and, like
McCahill, mostly huge Nirvana fans. Paul Lindner, a coding wunderkind
from northern Minnesota who was dubbed the Gopher Dude for his
evangelism, had long metal-head hair and signed Gopher emails with
lyrics like "You have to spit to see the shine" from Babes in Toyland.
Early Gopher servers were named Mudhoney, Danzig, and Anthrax. The sole
outlier in the microcomputer mosh pit was Bob Alberti, a programmer who
named a server Indigo, as in the Indigo Girls.
The center was in Shepherd Labs, a hulking cement building built like a
tank in 1968 on the U's Minneapolis campus, with concrete floors and no
windows. Early on, it was used for NASA materials research. "There were
pipes with strange fluids running through them," Lindner recalls.
The microcomputer team, in addition to developing software for the U,
ran a showroom for students and faculty interested in buying a Mac,
taught computer training classes, tested software, and served as a help
center for people with PC problems - walk-in and call-in. "Everyone
would answer phones at least one day a week," Lindner says, "even if
you were programming. That way you were close to the pain you were
inflicting on people - if programmers today still took calls, we'd have
more user-friendly software."
Gopher, however, was claiming more and more of their time. "It became
infectious," Lindner says. "How can we build this into the science
fiction of our dreams, access to all the information in the world, the
library of everything?"
The team, in 36-hour sessions fueled by beer, pizza, and speed metal,
finished writing Gopher in about three weeks. They installed the first
computer running a Gopher server - a Mac SE/30, a little droid of a
computer with an iPad-size monitor built in - in a narrow hallway
between their offices and the showroom, in a closet with metal shelves.
It became known as the Mother Gopher.
The committee meeting where the team first presented the Gopher
protocol was a disaster, "literally the worst meeting I've ever seen,"
says Alberti. "I still remember a woman in pumps jumping up and down
and shouting, 'You can't do that!' "
Among the team's offenses: Gopher didn't use a mainframe computer and
its server-client setup empowered anyone with a PC, not a central
authority. While it did everything the U required and then some, to the
committee it felt like a middle finger. "You're not supposed to have
written this!" Alberti says of the group's reaction. "This is some
lark, never do this again!" The Gopher team was forbidden from further
work on the protocol.
After the meeting, McCahill leaned on the director of the computer
center, a Chinese-American man named Shih Pau Yen, who had supported
Gopher all along. "I said I would quit before I stopped working on the
coolest thing we'd ever created," McCahill says. Yen ran interference,
and the Gopher team kept working on it in their own time.
"In this bureaucracy of little fiefdoms, where everyone had a hard time
working together, the one thing that could unify us was telling
everyone else off," Lindner says. "That was our rallying cry."
Finally, in April 1991, still unable to persuade the U to take on
Gopher, Lindner released it into the wild. He made the Gopher software
available via FTP - the most popular way to share information on the
internet at the time - and wrote a brief, quiet announcement on an
internet mailing list: Hey, we've got this thing, come and get it.
Within months, the team was hearing from Gopher users around the
country. "It was the first viral software," Alberti says. "All these
people started calling the U and pestering the president and other
administrators, saying, 'This Gopher thing is great, when are you going
to release a new version?' And the administrators said, 'What are you
talking about?'"
The ban was lifted. Never numbering more than six core members, the
team fanned out to conferences to spread the Gopher gospel, while
continuing to improve and diversify the protocol. In the process they
ended up laying the foundation for much of how we navigate the
internet. The first hyperlinks. The first bookmarks. McCahill, thinking
of windsurfing, even coined the term "surf the internet."
A video of veejay Adam Curry wearing an "Internet Gopher World Tour"
T-shirt on MTV.
Within a year, there were hundreds of Gopher servers. Berners-Lee, who
had publicly introduced the World Wide Web a few months after Gopher's
debut, used Gopher to do it. "People look at the World Wide Web today
and think it sprang out of Tim Berners-Lee's forehead," Alberti says.
"But the fact is, the only way he was able to spread the word about the
Web is because the Internet Gopher was there to allow people to
download his files, find a discussion group, and talk about it."
"We had the right product at the right time," McCahill says. "People
were looking to expand the internet beyond physicists' stuff. Gopher
could do that. It was simple to use, it could network lots and lots of
computers. It gave people a reason to say, hey, this internet is good."
Lindner was solicited for side gigs - twice he went to Ecuador to set
up Gopher for the country's fledgling internet. "That's when I knew we
were really onto something," he says, "when I was helping wire a whole
country."
Al Gore, then a U.S. senator, came to visit. Four GopherCons, held
between 1992 and 1995, drew reps from the New York Times, the World
Bank, Microsoft, and other global heavyweights. The Gopher T-shirt,
black and scribbly, listed the names of places with Gopher servers on
the back, in the style of rock tour shirts. It was an apt metaphor, as
Gopher team member Daniel Torrey told the Pioneer Press in 1996: "We
thought we were rock stars."
Some team members dreamed of fortune to go with their fame. But the
internet was not yet open for business. It had been built on dot-mil
and dot-edu, on public funds. Programmers shared source code; if you
needed something, someone gave it to you. A dot-com address was
considered crass. It was "as though all of TV was PBS," Lindner says.
"No commercials."
Still, Alberti raised the profit potential of Gopher with Shih Pau Yen.
Before coming to work in the Microcomputer Center, Alberti had helped
create the first online multi-player role-playing game - called Scepter
of Goth, an ancestor of World of Warcraft and the like. "I said we
should take this private, we should make a business of this and make
some money off it," Alberti recalls. "He looked at me like I'd just
grown another head."
Eventually, though, the U did want some money - for itself. At
GopherCon '93, Yen announced that for-profit Gopher users would need to
pay the U a licensing fee: hundreds or thousands of dollars, depending
on the size and nature of their business. Many users felt betrayed. In
the open-source computing spirit of the day, they had contributed code
to Gopher, helping the team keep up with the times. Now they were being
asked to pony up.
The reaction deflated the team. As hard as they were expected to work
on Gopher, they were never relieved of other duties, including
answering the U's help line. "We never got additional funding, we were
going broke," Alberti says. "We had the whole internet yelling at us,
when are you going to update your software, when are you going to put
images on Gopher pages, and make this smoother and better? And we're
like: 'We're six guys!'"
For a while, the U threatened to get rid of them altogether, a bid to
outsource the university's computer work, provoking one programmer to
bug a computer in Morrill Hall, the U's administrative center, so the
team could listen in on discussions.
Asking for a contribution seemed reasonable. When it backfired, the
team posted a defensive letter to Gopher users in March 1993: "... There
has been a lot of hysteria, misinformation, and rumor floating around.
.... In a time where we are having budgets slashed, it is impossible to
justify continued (increasing) resources being allocated to Gopher
development unless some good things result for the University of
Minnesota. This is a fact of life. ... Before you go off and flame once
more, ask yourself if you want to get YOUR particular server going with
as little fuss and expense as possible ... or if you just want to stir
up the soup."
"That socially killed Gopher," Alberti says of the licensing fiasco.
Yet it wasn't the end. In 1993, Gopher was still far more popular than
the World Wide Web, and Gopher traffic grew by 997 percent. But the Web
was starting to catch up - that year, it grew by 341,634 percent.
At the San Diego internet conference, in 1992, Berners-Lee had pulled
McCahill and Anklesaria aside on the last day of meetings and asked if
they wanted to collaborate on a Web/Gopher hybrid. Some melding of
their different designs - an internet super-system - though it wasn't
clear how that might work.
"Tim is a great guy, but he's a little odd, a little scattered,"
McCahill says. "Talking to him is like a ball of twine experience. The
Web you see now, that's how he thinks."
McCahill told Berners-Lee that he would need to look at the Web more
closely. But it wasn't much to look at when McCahill went back to
Minnesota and examined it. There were no graphics yet. It was still
only running on NeXT computers. "I wasn't feeling it," McCahill says. I
told him, 'Tim, I don't think so.' Of course, I look back and say, 'I
might have been wrong.' "
Soon enough, the Web did have pictures and was available on more
platforms. In 1993, the first popular Web browser, Mosaic, was
introduced for sale, breaking the commercial taboo of the internet and
suggesting - to McCahill at least - that tech investors had taken
sides. "The fix was in," he says.
In 1994, modem speeds doubled, and the interminable rendering of images
on the Web - once dubbed the World Wide Wait - greatly accelerated. PCs
began to be sold with these faster modems built in. To anyone looking
for a simple, even crude explanation for the Web's rise, this is it:
the ability to view a reasonable facsimile of a naked woman in the
privacy of your own home. "That's what came to drive a lot of the
internet," Alberti says. "Porn."
The Internet Gopher, with his text-only menu and gloss-less,
institutional mien, couldn't keep up. He had fallen off the wave, and
almost overnight was revealed as a buck-toothed square, ignored by the
girls on the beach, his surfboard held together by duct tape.
"Obsolesced," as one observer put it in 1994. A has-been.
"I remember the exact moment I knew I was no longer on the right
track," says Lindner. "It was September 9, 1993. I was invited to give
a talk about Gopher at Princeton, and I had my slides all printed up on
my little university-budget black-and-white foils. The person
presenting before me was talking about the future of the Web, with
full-color LCD projection. I said, 'I think I see where things are
going.' "
Mark McCahill's entry on the University of Minnesota's "Wall of
Discovery," which celebrates the accomplishments of students and
faculty.
For McCahill, the realization happened on the street. "I saw a URL on
the side of a bus," he says. "That's when I knew the Web was all about
advertising. Gopher was not good for advertising. I knew it would start
winding down."
In the spring of 1994, Web traffic overtook Gopher traffic for the
first time. Gopher, within a few months, began to decline. Its reign
had lasted three years.
The coup de grâce came from the U itself. In 1995, Dr. John Najarian, a
renowned transplant surgeon at the university, was indicted for tax
evasion, embezzlement, and fraud. Although Najarian was later cleared
of all charges, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) put the U on
probational status, threatening tens of millions of dollars in grants
and the school's viability as a top research institution. "It was an
all hands on deck situation," McCahill says.
The issue was essentially simple: bad accounting. Paperwork was
literally on paper, and transaction records sat around for weeks before
making it into a ledger, if they made it in at all. The Gopher
programming team was diverted to creating a more accountable accounting
system for the U, what turned out to be the first Web-based transaction
program. "That's what my kick-ass development shop did for a year and a
half," McCahill says, "to show the NIH that we were cleaning things
up." By the time they finished, the Internet Gopher was dead.
In the beginning, when the Mother Gopher was new and there were no
other Gopher servers to link to, Gopherspace was empty. The Gopher
team, to demonstrate the usefulness of their invention, dumped in a
cookbook and searched for eggplant. As late as 1993, the most popular
information in Gopherspace included recipes, weather, phone books, and
movies of chemical reactions.
"Gopher represented a simpler, more naïve time," says one of its
modern-day fans. Others call it "a purer way" of navigating the
internet, of "making structure out of chaos."
Today, there are about 140 Gopher servers still out there, many of them
relatively new. The tech world is not a sentimental place, but it does
appreciate simplicity and irony in equal measure - many of these
servers were set up on April Fool's Day.
Farhad Anklesaria: "You have to be at the right time and place to have
your technology take off and become popular."
Cameron Kaiser, perhaps the Internet Gopher's greatest advocate these
days (he runs a Gopher support site called the Overbite Project),
figures he spends about 25 percent of his internet time in Gopherspace.
"It's actually rather nice to have a small ecosystem because no one's
running annoying ads in Gopherspace or trying to track your browsing
habits," he says. "The protocol makes the former hard and the latter
almost impossible."
As the Web has become synonymous with the internet, and we conduct more
of our lives online, we've learned to abide the misinformation,
solicitations, and scams that thrive in its chaos - though it has
changed us and society in ways we are only beginning to understand. If
Gopher had won out, who knows how things would be different.
The Gopher team, who might understandably be disappointed, seem
genuinely OK with how things turned out. More than OK, actually, as
though they expected it. They were first, after all. And in the march
of technology, the first are eventually last. "This is the natural
order of things," Anklesaria says. "You have some building blocks - the
natural thing to do is build on them. That's how civilization
bootstraps and how we progress."
If they are surprised by anything, it's that the Web was the system
that surpassed them and has outlasted everything else. There was a
protocol that was better than either the Web or Gopher, they say,
called Hyper-G, developed in Austria, which never got off the ground.
"You have to be at the right time and place to have your technology
take off and become popular," says Anklesaria. "If you're at the base
of a wave, you have a chance to rise with it. But if you're already on
top of the wave and the wave has broken, that's not good - if you're
too early, you won't last."
Bob Alberti: "The only way [Tim Berners-Lee] was able to spread the
word about the Web is because the Internet Gopher was there to allow
people to download his files, find a discussion group, and talk about
it."
On July 1, 1997, or maybe in 2009, most likely in the 2000s, someone
walked into the closet in Shepherd Labs and unplugged the Mother
Gopher. No one can agree on the date. No one from the Gopher team was
around.
"While I was at the U," McCahill says, "it was a point of pride that
we'd keep running the server." But McCahill left in 2007 to become a
systems architect at Duke University, developing instructional and
research computing technology. Lindner left in 1996, having followed a
Gopher side gig to Geneva, Switzerland, where he worked for the United
Nations, and is now a software engineer for Google. Anklesaria retired
last spring. Of the core Gopher team members, Alberti is the only one
still at the U, as an information security architect.
At its peak, the Mother Gopher consisted of 10 Apple IIci computers.
But when it was finally euthanized, who knows what shape it was in.
There was no ceremony. Nothing was carted off to a museum. Gopherspace
simply became emptier, and the world without the Web became harder to
imagine.
About the Author:
Tim Gihring
Tim Gihring is a Minneapolis writer and editor and a former chair of
the Minneapolis Arts Commission.
Comments (29)
The day the Gopher died
Submitted by Keith Dawson on August 11, 2016 - 10:23am.
Sounds like Mark McCahill and his crew were clear-sighted about the
Gopher's chances once the Web began gathering serious momentum. I
remember well the moment when I knew that RFC 1436's sun was setting:
it was when I read that the Web had surrounded and engulfed the Gopher.
Probably 1994. It suddenly became possible to begin a URL with
gopher:// instead of http:// - and game over. You need never leave your
Web browser again.
For a few years in the early history of the Web, browsers supported
gopher:// directly. Support began drying up as the 90s progressed and
now you need to download a Firefox extension (from the Overbite
project, natch: http://gopher.floodgap.com/overbite/ ) to play natively
in Gopherspace.
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thanx
Submitted by Rod Copeland on August 12, 2016 - 1:25am.
Many thanks for the link to Floodgap's Overbite Project... The Firefox
Gopher extension is working very nicely (running FF v8.0 on Win7).
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I'm the Gopher Dude -- Ask me Anything
Submitted by Paul Lindner on August 11, 2016 - 12:28pm.
What a nice trip down memory lane. Happy to answer any questions anyone
may have.
Fun Fact: The accounting system we worked on was named "FormsNirvana".
Refer to the album cover of Nirvana's Nevermind to understand why...
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Thanks for the work, and thanks for the memories
Submitted by Jonathan Sweet on August 11, 2016 - 1:25pm.
Gopher was amazing in its day (text without fluff); POPmail rocked my
world (Moof!). Thanks for the work, and thanks for memories, all.
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Well, now I feel much older
Submitted by Jack Lint on August 11, 2016 - 4:39pm.
I remember using Gopher to search the Bodleian card catalog. At the
same time the best you could do with Mosaic was see what tie a
particular professor had chosen to wear that day or see if a coffee
maker at Cambridge had fresh coffee or not. Gopher had real uses at
that point while the web was still in the interesting, but frivolous
stage.
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Gopher memories
Submitted by Brooke Nielsen on August 11, 2016 - 5:09pm.
Fun to see this story from another perspective. I worked at the U on
Frank Grewe's team as a unix sys admin in central computing. edh had
installed a web server on port 80 for the root www.umn.edu domain and
included a list of his top best links. It was like this for a long time
before anyone noticed or cared.
Once University Relations realized the official University presence in
this new domain was an programmer's list of favorite links, we got
tasked with working with a media people from U relations, and a
librarian (selected for their organizational skills) to program the
first html site for the U -- with one caveat -- we were not allowed to
develop any functionality not also available on gopher.
From my perspective, the U was totally committed to gopher until 1997
or 1998ish and required the central computing programming staff to
build online functionality (class schedules, course overviews, book
lists, grades, class registration) in both gopher forms and the web.
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No Factual Basis for This Article
Submitted by Peter Schaeffer on August 12, 2016 - 10:13am.
This article claims to be a factual history of Gopher and the Web. This
is clearly not true. The article states "The IETF had been convening
since 1986 to iron out these issues". This is obviously a falsehood. Al
Gore didn't create the Internet until the 1990s. There is no way the
IETF could have been operating back in the 1980s.
Clearly false.
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DId you forgot the /s at the
Submitted by Paul Lindner on August 12, 2016 - 10:52am.
DId you forgot the /s at the end of your comment? Like most things the
history isn't black or white. I've had people introduce me as the
"Inventor" of Gopher, which results in a odd clarifications.
In any case here's a pretty good writeup of the history.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Gore_and_information_technology
But I'd say of late that Vint Cerf gets more credit than Gore...
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Who Created the Internet
Submitted by Peter Schaeffer on August 12, 2016 - 12:27pm.
I would be the first to argue (and have argued repeatedly) that the
Federal government, created the Internet (starting with ARPANET). Al
Gore deserves credit for encouraging the growth (and commercialization)
of what eventually became the modern Internet. However, he didn't
'create the Internet' (as he foolishly claimed). The link you provided
mentions two pieces of legislation that Gore introduced (S 2594
Supercomputer Network Study Act of 1986 and the High Performance
Computing Act of 1991). However, the first bill never passed. A decent
summary of the entire topic can be found over at "A cautionary tale for
politicians: Al Gore and the 'invention' of the Internet" (Fact Checker
- WaPo).
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Success has many fathers
Submitted by Paul Lindner on August 13, 2016 - 2:11am.
Thanks for that, I figured that your original post was snark; but
wasn't sure.
Thinking back the one event that I believe really changed things was
when the NSFNet changed their acceptable use policy.
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Except he didn't say he invented the internet
Submitted by Harris Goldstein on August 14, 2016 - 12:22am.
What he said:
"During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative
in creating the Internet."
And if you want a more complete discussion:
http://www.snopes.com/quotes/internet.asp
http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/2011/0603/Political-misquotes-The
-...
http://web.eecs.umich.edu/~fessler/misc/funny/gore,net.txt
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Al Gore was there, where were you?
Submitted by Bob Alberti on August 16, 2016 - 2:46pm.
The sneer about Al Gore inventing the Internet has always annoyed me.
When we were working on Gopher we were visited by exactly one sitting
US Senator. Al Gore. He was there, where were the rest of his critics?
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But Everyone knows that Bill Joy created the Internet... ;)
Submitted by Bradley D. Thornton on August 13, 2016 - 9:24pm.
And in refusing to incorporate the clustermucked BBN code into BSD is
attributed with having said the following in response to how he could
have done such a thing when millions of dollars and teams of software
engineers at BBN couldn't produce a viable IP stack (in his opinion,
which, historically speaking, is the IP stack decended down to us
today):
"It's very simple - you read the protocol and write the code." - Bill
Joy
Whether that was the exact quote or not is debatable, yet it is
certainly inline with Joy's timbre. When someone "creates something",
they actually create it - they aren't the ones who draw it on a piece
of paper, their the one(s) who write it, compile it, and run it for the
first time before giving it away for the rest of us to adopt; and such
was the case with the IP stack because it enabled us (at the DoD) to
finally abandon NCP on *Flag Day* (01 January 1983).
Of course, my comment is half tongue in cheek... but then again it's
not, coz it's the reality of the situation. Bill Joy created the
Internet (Muaahahaha!).
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Invention may be the mother of exaggeration
Submitted by Frank Dana on August 16, 2016 - 5:21pm.
That's OK, #TIL (in this very piece) that Steve Jobs "invented" the
NeXT computer system, which... feels like a generous description of his
role in its actual development.
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Not sure if your comment is
Submitted by Chris Woodfield on September 4, 2016 - 1:27pm.
Not sure if your comment is intended as satire or not, but for the
record, the first IETF meeting took place in 1986.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Engineering_Task_Force#Meetings
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Gopher vs. the Web
Submitted by Peter Schaeffer on August 12, 2016 - 10:14am.
I actually used Gopher and the Web early on. To state this directly,
Gopher was awful. Every time I encountered a Gopher site, I groaned and
hoped for a fast switch to the Web. Fortunately, most sites made a
rapid conversion. The State Department had an early Gopher site for
"Travel Alerts and Warnings". Using it was painful.
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Good Memories
Submitted by Christopher Williams on August 12, 2016 - 9:44am.
consultant.micro.umn.edu
That address pretty much defined my teenage years. I discovered Gopher
in high school at the Saint Paul Public Library. They had a gopher
terminal setup, and it blew my mind how I was able to get all over the
world from my WYSE terminal in all it's amber screen glory sitting at
the Sunray branch. I was even able to link to a provider of free
internet email using a program called PINE. Upon some investigation one
day when the connection failed, I discovered that the library was
dialing in via a local 612 number.
I quickly went home and dialed the same number from my 2400bps modem.
It connected and I was sitting at a plain prompt. Just ">:". I didn't
know what to do. I typed in the address I had seen at the top of the
Gopher screen in the library, consultant.micro.umn.edu. No username. No
password prompt. Suddenly I was at the same Gopher mothership server as
the library! Thru trial and error, I found on slow links to other
gopher servers I could ^C the connection and be dropped to a telnet
prompt (fast links wouldn't give you enough time to do it). Ooooh. What
was telnet? After checking out some books at the library, I found out
about MUDs. If I typed "open queen.mcs.drexel.edu:4000" I was suddenly
joined to a massively multiplayer text game with hundreds of online
users (this was in 1992). This pretty much soaked up all of my time
that summer. And all for free based on my sleuthing! I was ecstatic.
Gopher and Forbidden Lands Dikumud. Great times. This directly led to
me working in the IT industry, and heavily influenced my career path. I
owe a big thanks to the guys out there that made this possible!
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Glad to hear your story
Submitted by Paul Lindner on August 12, 2016 - 11:03am.
Glad to hear your story Christopher.
For the history books consultant.micro.umn.edu was a RS/6000 running
AIX in Shepherd Labs. If memory serves it was one of the first models
(maybe the 520?)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RS/6000
You can blame me for any security holes that allowed you to drop out of
a telnet session into the prompt. Glad it was useful for you. MUDs were
fun.
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consultant history
Submitted by Paul Lindner on August 12, 2016 - 12:11pm.
Okay, dug through the archives.
Consultant was a PowerStation 320 running AIX with a POWER1 CPU running
at 20Mhz and 16MB or RAM. That was pretty sweet at the time since the
POWER1 was a superscalar processor that could execute up to 5 opcodes
per clock.
The actual name we gave this box was hafnhaf. We named it for the brain
eating robot in Rudy Rucker's Software. (We also had mrfrosty and
others)
The official name is 'consultant' because we did an end-run around the
powers that be to launch the service. We marketed the system as a tech
support tool and linked our local resources with remote ones. [Adding
links to the rest of the world was just the icing]
When you logged in the system executed the Gopher Curses client. Gopher
did allow you to execute external programs, that's how we linked to
telnet services.
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Phenomenal story
Submitted by April King on August 12, 2016 - 3:58pm.
It's detailed histories like this that make me proud to be a MinnPost
member. Fantastic work here!
It's a shame that the U didn't devote more resources to Gopher and
frightened early adopters with concerns about licensing. If they
hadn't, we might be dealing with a considerably different internet than
we have today and we might be calling him Sir Mark McCahill.
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Early gopher admin...
Submitted by Neeran Karnik on August 12, 2016 - 11:52pm.
Great read, nostalgia-inducing! I was a grad student in CS at the Univ.
of Minnesota in those days (1991-1998), and I helped set up one of the
most popular gopher sites in those days -- CricInfo. It still exists as
a web site (www.cricinfo,com), and is now owned by ESPN. CricInfo
started at UMN as a bot on IRC that would respond to direct messages
and send back cricket (the sport)-related information, scorecards,
statistics, etc. I then set up a gopherd server on top, and immediately
its usage exploded -- lots of folks had access to gopher clients those
days of course, and it was much easier to use than the IRC bot. We
first hosted the CricInfo gopherd on an old 80386 PC at North Dakota
State U (tulip.ee.ndsu.nodak.edu!), and later in 1993 moved it to a Sun
workstation at Oregon Grad Inst. (cricinfo.cse.ogi.edu).
After a while, we considered moving to http and rejected the idea! We
had no use for those fancy "hyperlinks", nor for image downloads --
because most of our data was plaintext and statistics. It was only in
mid-1995 that we eventually added http, but we kept the gopher server
going (and kept getting traffic on it) for a few years afterwards!
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Thank you Early Pioneers!
Submitted by Mohammed Masud on August 13, 2016 - 4:56pm.
Dear Paul,
I would like to say THANK YOU for your contributions to the development
of the Internet as we know it today. If it weren't for the early
pioneers such as yourself, society as we know it today may have
developed very differently. Today the internet is the heart of everyday
life helping us to function as a society in ways unthinkable just 30
years ago.
Most experience with the early days of the internet was mostly through
America Online, Prodigy, and Apple's eWorld. But after 1996 when I
started using Geocities and Xoom did I learn about html. That's when I
started to learn about servers, clients, html, www, and ftp among
others. Gopher was unknown to me, as a user, at that time. Learning
about it now helps to appreciate a side of history that many like me,
may have never experienced. Yet the elements of Gopher such as the
hyperlinks, are still being utilized today and many (including myself)
are oblivious to it.
Amazing, just amazing.
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The day the music died
Submitted by Mahesh Paolini-Subramanya on August 14, 2016 - 6:52am.
This understates, if anything, the impact of GopherCon '93 :-)
The thing to remember is that around then, the majority of the
users/contributors were from universities and/or idealists (remember -
this was waaaay back when!).
I still remember the palpable deflation in the room, this sense of
"Wait, *what*?" that - in my case at least - had me breaking out in a
cold sweat. And yes, I was one of those university/idealists - from the
Notre Dame contingent, one of the earliest adopters. We had spent the
last year working on, evangelizing, and outright pushing gopher
*everywhere* on campus, and, quite literally overnight, Everything
Changed.
I think it was less than a few months later that we were actively
looking into Mosaic instead...
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Trackbacks
Submitted by Paul Lindner on August 14, 2016 - 8:52am.
Since this blog doesn't support trackbacks or WebMentions I've
collected some of the links to other discussions:
Hacker News:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12269784
Slashdot:
https://slashdot.org/story/16/08/13/2255201/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-go
p...
Reddit:
/r/programming
https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/4xd2c7/the_rise_and_fall_
o...
/r/minnesota
https://www.reddit.com/r/minnesota/comments/4x8tsx/25_years_ago_a_small
_...
r/Gopher
https://www.minnpost.com/business/2016/08/rise-and-fall-gopher-protocol
[and others.. see their 'Related Discussions']
Solyent News
https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=16/08/12/2129228
Or just search Google/Facebook/Twitter/Google+ for "Gopher Protocol"
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What a great writeup Tim
Submitted by Steve Borsch on August 15, 2016 - 4:12pm.
Nicely done on this writeup Tim. Though I lived through this time in
Minnesota technology, I didn't know but about 25% of what you covered.
It was really nice to have it laid out so well.
Must admit that Minnesota was soooo cloooose on breakout technology.
Once with Control Data and again with Gopher.
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Supplemental Reading
Submitted by Bob Alberti on August 16, 2016 - 3:31pm.
Here is a paper I wrote about Gopher as part of the undergraduate
degree that took me 32 years to complete.
https://www.scribd.com/document/211995069/Internet-Gopher-Bridge-to-the
-...
For those really interested in Internet history, here is a paper
regarding Scepter of Goth, recognized by Internet historian Professor
Richard Bartle of Essex University as the world's first commercial
MMORPG, written by Alan Klietz for our business GamBit MultiSystems in
1983.
https://www.scribd.com/document/205379306/Scepter-of-Goth-history
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Phlogosphere
Submitted by Bob Alberti on August 16, 2016 - 3:46pm.
For those interested in trying out Gopher, SDF.org maintains an
operational Gopher server at http://phlogosphere.org/
You can browse it with the Overbite add-on to Firefox, or use the SDF
provided web proxy.
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Article in the Chronicle of Higher Education
Submitted by Bob Alberti on September 6, 2016 - 2:17pm.
Here is an article on Internet Gopher in the Chronicle of Higher
Education. Good job to Tim Gihring for scooping these guys, since they
started writing this way back last spring, but only published it now.
http://www.chronicle.com/article/How-Gopher-Nearly-Won-the/237682
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Thanks.
Submitted by David Bergum on November 1, 2016 - 5:11pm.
This is a great article and a nice walk down memory lane.