The U's Gopher system was the early way around the Net
Sherri Cruz
Star Tribune
Published Nov 5 2001
Before Jeff Bezos, before Marc Andreessen, software engineers Mark
McCahill, Farhad Anklesaria and a team of developers at the University
of Minnesota created a campus-wide information system that changed the
way people used the Internet.
The system, which came to be known as Gopher -- named for the school's
furry, buck-toothed mascot and its fetching quality -- caused quite a
stir when the Gopher team presented it to the design committee in
1991. Seems Gopher wasn't quite what the committee had in mind, but
the Gopher gang said it was better than the committee-designed system.
So there was nothing left to do but set it free on the Internet.
Gopher was a hit. Universities and libraries all over the world
quickly began using Gopher. The University of Minnesota eventually
adopted it, too. With Gopher, users could quickly find, search and
retrieve information and resources from computers (Gopher servers)
connected to the Internet. The user was presented with a menu that
listed choices linking to plain-text information.
The user-friendly Gopher made the Internet a neat and orderly place,
like a library. Soon other technologies were built to enhance Gopher.
One example was Veronica, a searchable index of Gopher menus, which
did for Gopher sort of what Google does for the Web.
But Gopher was just the beginning.
Within three years, Gopher was being pushed aside by the World Wide
Web, another protocol for the Internet conceived by Tim Berners-Lee
and others at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research,
based in Geneva.
Still in college at the time, Andreessen launched the Web browser
Mosaic, one of the early ways to view Web pages. Andreessen later
founded Netscape, which released Navigator, and was followed by
Microsoft's Internet Explorer.
Then regular people wanted home pages, and companies sprang up to
build those pages. Businesses got in the game. Start-ups formed to
help businesses put up their Web brochures and later e-commerce sites
and then business-to-business sites. Advertisers dug in, too. Now
there are banners, pop-ups, pop-overs and pop-unders, the incessant
pop-all-over XCam ad as well as brilliant graphics, animation, audio
and video and the awesome potential that the Internet still holds.
Hogs and portals
Ten years later, the Internet landscape has changed. Gopher has been
virtually knocked out by the Web but maintains a cult following. As
McCahill and Anklesaria, both 40 years old, look back at the Gopher
days, they find themselves where they started.
"In a funny way, I'm still working on a campus information system" for
the University of Minnesota, McCahill said.
Only this time the rage on campus is portals. The team, led by
McCahill, is working on a "personalized dynamic portal site" for the
university's Academic Health Center. It will stitch together the
related systems and offer custom interactive news delivery for faculty
via the Net.
They also are working on software to make personalized hog futures
contracts so farmers can negotiate better deals. Hog contracts are
complex because the pricing for next year's hogs is the market's best
guess, McCahill said. The program works by mixing in current futures
pricing, historical pricing data, different types of contracts and
various calculations, to reach the market price for hogs and what a
given contract might pay.
"We learned a lot about hogs," McCahill said. Next up: Cattle
contracts.
This kind of outreach work is becoming a more common way for the
university to earn money because it's getting less state support, he
said.
McCahill's office looks like what you might expect from someone who
leads a bunch of developers: a windsurfing board leaning against the
wall; computer plugs, cords and motherboards in scattered heaps; an
array of Internet books lining the shelves, including a stray "Atoms
and Molecules" text from his days at the university as a chemistry
major; and piles of CDs including the Ramones, Herbie Hancock and
Steely Dan.
Tall, thin and ponytailed, McCahill plugs away on his Apple laptop, a
nifty G4 Titanium model. He prefers the Mac (with a Linux operating
system) for a few reasons. One, he dislikes the extent that Microsoft
operating systems have saturated the industry. And two, he's working
on video applications, and Apple's iMovie video software is easier to
use.
Those were the days
These days he has a lot more managing to do because his department --
Academic and Distributed Computing Services -- has grown. Ten years
ago, he had six people; today he has 20. He writes enough software to
stay in the loop. "I'm always suspicious of mangers that don't write
software," he said.
While McCahill enjoys what he's doing today, he is nostalgic about the
Gopher days.
Ten years ago, the Internet was undeveloped territory, and it was
easier to be inventive, McCahill said. "Back then a small group of
developers could make a difference." The insights were a little easier
to come by, and most of the players were individuals or small teams.
"You didn't have the big computer companies muddying the water," he
said. Microsoft didn't get into the Internet until much of the
pioneering work was done.
Today, he said, everything has been mined, and millions of eyes are
exploring Internet technologies.
In the Gopher era, the Internet wasn't yet commercialized and people
weren't developing applications to make money. The Gopher project
didn't even have a budget, McCahill said.
"We did it because we thought it was a cool piece of software," he
said. In addition, the capital markets weren't Internet-hungry yet.
"There wasn't a big venture-capital market trying to commercialize
this stuff," he said.
"We were boring," Anklesaria said facetiously. "We were just academic
guys."
Chaos over order
Over the years, McCahill and Anklesaria have received a lot of flak
about missing the boat, failing to see the coming Web trend and
earning virtually nothing from Gopher. The university didn't make
money from Gopher either. By the time it began charging a server
access fee, it was too late -- the Web had consumed the Internet. "We
didn't think to license or patent it," McCahill said.
McCahill and Anklesaria have given a lot of thought to what could have
been, but they both contend that Gopher was a means of organizing the
Internet and wasn't meant to compete with the Web. The Web and Gopher
easily could have coexisted.
To some extent they do. Today there are plenty of avid Gopher fans,
such as Cameron Kaiser. He said he still uses Gopher because it is
lightweight and fast and delivers information without ads and long
download times. He even uses Gopher on his Commodore 64 -- which says
a few things about Kaiser. "Mind you, the Web isn't going to go away,
but I think there's definite room for both technologies to coexist,"
Kaiser said.
"The Web definitely has a bigger variety, but I'm sure many will agree
that quantity doesn't mean quality." Much of the information that
exists on Gopher servers is academic-and government-oriented.
But good luck tapping into a Gopher server. Most aren't being
maintained anymore, and Microsoft's Internet Explorer will not get you
anywhere near a Gopher. Netscape 4.0 and higher or a Lynx browser
will, however.
Philip Frana said that while Gopher is a good illustration of
pioneering an Internet culture, its downfall says something about
society. Frana is software history project manager for the Charles
Babbage Institute, a center at the University of Minnesota devoted to
the history of computing.
"The major thing -- that tells us a lot about ourselves -- is we like
the Web better," he said. Gopher prestructured everything, while the
Web "isn't like that at all." People chose disorganization over order.
Tea with his son
Anklesaria, who wrote much of the Gopher software, is less than
enthusiastic about the Internet's future. The Internet has taken a
detour, he said, "In many ways, a bad one." He calls the dot-com days
a "dark, dead time" in Internet history -- not because the dot-coms
withered, but because glitz and banner ads reigned and hardware
innovation was stagnant. Corporations such as Microsoft have taken
over, Anklesaria said. He is adamant about maintaining his
"Microsoft-free" status.
The one spark, Anklesaria said, is the open-source movement, which
means sharing free or near-free software and code via the Internet.
Red Hat's Linux operating system is an example of open-source
software. "We try to pay back in kind," Anklesaria said. If they use a
company's free software, they might in turn buy the company's server
products. One other advantage of open-source is that a developer can
take over and enhance an application where the original developer left
off.
Today McCahill and Anklesaria also have a life; they don't go home to
tinker. "Heck no," Anklesaria said. He has a wife and an 8-year-old
son with whom he shares tea after school. "That's very valuable
because that time will never come again," Anklesaria said.
McCahill just bought a synthesizer and is interested in music.
They're not looking to invent the next Internet technology and are
content with being onetime Internet rock stars. Those were the days
when they spoke at Internet conferences and annual GopherCons --
conventions revolving around Gopher and Internet technologies. They
mingled with fellow pioneers such as the Web's Burners-Lee, Internet
hero John Postel -- who died in 1998 -- and Vint Cerf, who developed
Internet protocol.
"It was a big deal when Vint Cerf said, 'Hey, you did a good thing
with this,'" McCahill said.
"It was fun," Anklesaria said. "My father still looks at me
curiously."
There is a sense of satisfaction too, that Gopher has earned a place
in Internet history.
"We were in the right place at the right time with the right answer,"
McCahill said.
-- Sherri Cruz is at scruz@startribune.com .
Copyright 2001 Star Tribune. All rights reserved.