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- How the Web ate Gopher
- July 25th 2022
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I was reading this article today from 2016 about the Gopher protocol,
https://www.minnpost.com/business/2016/08/rise-and-fall-gopher-protocol/
and I was fascinated to learn a couple of things...

1. The www was developed by TBL for places like CERN, Stanford, and the CIA,
to distribute large cenralized troves of data. While Gopher was developed
by long haired 20 somethings at UofM, to be able to run servers on nearly
any small computer. This made the admins at UofM so mad, that one admin 
stood in the middle of the room jumping up and down in pumps screaming, 
"you cant do that!" "you cant do that!". The UofM wanted the protocol to
give them gate keeping control over everything that was moving across the
internet, forcing traffic through mainframes. When it didnt, they tried to 
shut development down.

2. The first gopher servers were named things like Danzig, Mudhoney, and 
Anthrax

3. According to the developers of Gopher, the real reason www took off over 
gopher, was the simple fact that while gopher was 100 times better at
organizing and making data available, www could serve ads and porn, and
gopher couldnt. 

4. The last stage of Gopher development was done in secret, hidden from the
UofM administrators, and was released to the internet, becoming the first viral 
software release. People loved Gopher so much that when many of them started
calling the U of M asking when new releases were coming, they pretended
they had never tried to stop it, and instead tried to charge people for it, 
which wound up killing the project. 

5. The phrase "surf the web" was coined by the two original Gopher devs,
one of whom was a windsurfer. 

6. Gopher devs claim that the eratic stream of conciousness hyperlink to 
hyperlink behavior of the www comes from the eratic thinking and personality
of Tim Berners Lee, who naturally programmed how he thought into the protocol.