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
________________________________________________________________________
Introduction
Brief Chronology
Potential Explanations
Conclusion
References
Revision History
________________________________________________________________________
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 will 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
(NCP) terminal of another computer.
Network
Control
Protocol 1969 Allowed sharing of resources between computers
that went beyond simple terminal emulation.
(FTP)
File
Transfer
Protocol 1972 Files could be shared remotely.
(TCP)
Transmission
Control
Protocol 1975 Allowed resource sharing between networks
other than the ARPANET.
(IP)
Internet
Protocol 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, which 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
-----------------------------------------------------
_________________________________________________________
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 were 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.
In 1990, the year before Gopher got started, Conseil Européen pour la
Recherche Nucléaire (CERN) in Geneva, Switzerland developed and began to
use a system it called the "World Wide Web." It also allowed for search
and retrieval of files across a heterogenous network, but it was based
on a different information architecture (more on this later).
_______________________________________________________________________
| Department of History Home page (pl of 9) |
| |
| |
| _____________________________________________________________ |
| |
| WELCOME TO MARSHAL UNIVERSITY'S DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY |
| |
| _____________________________________________________________ |
| |
| |
| Department of History |
| Office: 104 Harris Hall |
| Phone/Voice Mail: (304) 6966-6780 |
| Admin Secretary Sr.: (To obtain additional information click here) |
| Ms. Terry Dennis DBU016@marshall.wvnet.edu |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
|--Press space for more, u to return to previous, '?' help, 'q' quit |
| Arrow keys: Up/Down to move. Right to follow a link, Left go Back |
| H)elp O)ptions P)rint G)o M)ain screen Q)uit /=search [Del]=history |
|_______________________________________________________________________|
An early text-based Web browser
The adoption of the Web quickly became international. In 1991, the
Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) in California became the first
Web server in the United States. The Hypertext'91 conference that was held
soon after in San Antonio, TX, further advanced the Web development cause.
In 1992, the Gopher development community had a conference of its own,
GopherCon'92. Many new ideas and implementations were presented and
shared. There was talk already of improving on Gopher through a version
called Gopher+. [Riddle] This new version of the Gopher protocol, which
allowed for additional file types and attributes, including multiple
views of the same document, was implemented soon after the conference.
Gopher's usability was enhanced significantly on November 17, 1992,
when Steven Foster and Fred Barrie at the University of Nevada at Reno
released a tool called Veronica (Very Easy Rodent-Oriented Net-wide
Index to Computerized Archives). Much as Archie did for FTP, Veronica
provided a searchable index of Gopher menus. A spider crawled around
Gopher menus all over the world, collecting links and retrieving them
for the index. It became so popular that it quickly became very difficult
to connect to Veronica, despite a number of other sites being developed
to ease the load. In 1993, Rhett "Jonzy" Jones at the University of
Utah invented Jughead (Jonzy's Universal Gopher Hierarchy Excavation
and Display). This tool was similar to Veronica, except that it indexed
single sites, instead of all Gopherspace. (Peter Deutsch, who developed
Archie, insisted its name was short for Archiver, and had nothing to
do with the comic strip. He was supposedly disgusted when Veronica and
Jughead appeared.)
[Howe, "A Brief History"]
Not only did the infrastructure of Gopherspace improve dramatically
in its early years, but the Gopher clients used to view and navigate
Gopherspace also became much more user-friendly. Functionality such as
bookmarking was improved, graphic user interfaces (GUIs) were released,
and there was even a client called TurboGopherVR that allowed users to
search gopher space through a 3-dimensional interface.
______________________________________________________________________
|______________________________________________________________________|
|(0||0) WS GOPHER 1.1 [Gopher main menu] | |===|\ /||
|---------------------------------------------------------|===|___|/_\||
|______________________________________________________________________|
| \|/ File Edit Bookmark Config Window Help | |===|\ /||
|______-_____-____-________-______-______-________________|===|___|/_\||
|----------------------------------------------------------------------|
| +/ | "~ | [} | (i) | () | || | /0 | // | =- | | . | /-/ | |?| ||
|_____|_____|_____|_____|____|____|____|____|____|_____|_____|________||
| _ |
| |_| IMPORTANT INFORMATION ABOUT THE U OF I GOPHER - |
| |
| |_] Information about gopher |
| -0 Keyword search |
| |_] Univ of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Campus Information |
| |_] Computer documentation and information |
| |_] Libraries and Reference Information |
| |_] Publications of U of I Press, Newspapers, Newsletters |
| |_] Other gopher and information servers |
| |_] Phone Books (ph) |
| |_] Internet File Server (ftp) Sites |
| |
| |
|______________________________________________________________________|
|_<_|______________________________________________________________|_>_|
A Gopher Client available in 1994
(just think win95 GUI with blue/grey menu bars, and little yellow
folders like so "|_]" for the gopher menus/Directories)
The annual growth rate for Gopher traffic in 1993 was 997%. * [Treese,
II1] Libraries, campuses and even some companies began to jump on
the Gopher band wagon. Setting up a Gopher server was seen by many
as the easiest and most effective way to establish a niche on the
Internet. By April of 1994, the number of known Gopher servers had
reached 6958. [Treese, II2]
Then Mosaic entered the picture. Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina posted
the Unix version of Mosaic to NCSA's servers in the winter of 1993
"and it spread like a virus after that," (9) [Reid] with 1600 copies
being downloaded per day by 1994. [Treese, II2] In January of 1993, just
before Mosaic's release, the Web was .002% of backbone packet traffic,
ranked 127th largest source of traffic. By June, it was in 21st place
with .25%. By September, it had reached 16th place, with Gopher still
ahead in 10th place and FTP in first. (16) [Reid] Annual rate of growth
for WWW traffic in 1993 was 341,634% [Treese, II1]
In 1994, the First International WWW Conference was held in Geneva, at
CERN. It attracted more than 600 Web enthusiasts, only 400 of which could
be admitted and was dubbed the "Woodstock of the Web." [Cailliau] The
Second WWW Conference was by NCSA in Chicago and attracted 1800 people,
of which only 1300 can be admitted. Tim Berners-Lee and the Laboratory
for Computer Science (LCS) of MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
soon set up the W3C Consortium in the US.
Different sources of data on Internet traffic during this period [Treese,
II2] [Pitkow, "Third Degree"] [Treese, II5] [Pitkow, "Relation"] [Treese,
II22] [GVU] [Treese, II7] provide somewhat different numbers, but they
all describe the same general trend: both the WWW and Gopher continued
to grow, but at quickly diverging rates. By some time around the middle
of 1994 (depending on whom you ask), WWW growth shot far ahead of Gopher
growth. Within a few months after this split, Gopher traffic actually
began to decrease. In addition to these trends in traffic, the number of
links to the different types of servers also changed dramatically. Between
the spring and fall of 1995, links to servers other than WWW servers (FTP,
Gopher, etc.) were down, indicating to many people that these non-WWW
services "may very well become legacy services." [Pitkow and Recker, 4th]
(Picture of graph of monthly packets transfers by protocol 93-95)
(todo)
The years 1993 and 1994 also saw numerous advances in indexing and search
engine technology and availability. [Sonnenreich] These engines made
the Web much more usable and often neglected Gopherspace. This had a
recursive effect. As the Web became easier to use and more content-rich,
traffic grew. As traffic grew, content providers had more incentive to
invest in the Web. By early 1995, Lycos had indexed 3.6 million pages
on 23,550 different Web servers.[Treese, II7]
As the popular media constantly remind us, the astronomical growth of
the Web continues to this day. Gopher, on the other hand, has largely
dropped out of the picture. The Usenet newsgroups dedicated to discussions
about Gopher have very little traffic, with most recent messages either
lamenting the loss of Gopher or lampooning it as a useless technology. A
large proportion of Gopher servers have either been taken down or remain
simply to point users to the Web. Gopherspace is littered with messages
like the following:
The University of Houston Libraries Gopher is no longer being
maintained. Many of the resources that were here, plus much more,
are available through the University of Houston Libraries
Web Server at http://info.lib.uh.edu [University of Houston
Gopher].
Even the University of Minnesota's own Gopher server [University of
Minnesota Gopher] is showing signs of decay. It is still maintained,
but content is a bit lacking and the Veronica server is no longer
operational. Gopher, it would seem, is simply no longer a viable option
for Internet development, use or information delivery.
One might ask what caused such a radical rise and fall in such a brief
period, or, as one author bluntly asks, "Who Killed Gopher?" [Khare]
Two Explanations: Pure Technology or Mind Share
================================================
Pure Technology
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Wrong model of hypertext
-------------------------
One common explanation of Gopher's demise is that it does not
support hypertext, which is what the Internet really should be
providing. Without hyperlinks, this argument goes, Gopher is little
more than an electronic filing system. The Web, on the other hand,
makes great use of hypertext. In order to discuss this position, it is
helpful to get a better idea of what exactly hypertext is.
In 1945 Vannevar Bush, science adviser to President Roosevelt, wrote
a now famous article in the Atlantic Monthly about what he called the
"Memex," a device (based on microfilm) for storing vast amounts of
documents in a single workspace, with tools for finding, organizing
and adding to the repository. [Bush] This vision of the memex inspired
many later developers. It served as an ideal toward which information
technology system developers could strive.
In the 1960s, Douglas Engelbart produced the first real hypertext
system. He and people like Joseph Licklider aimed to use computers
to augment human intelligence through the effective manipulation of
information. In 1968, Ted Nelson coined the term "hypertext," which is
now in common use. Nelson laid out project Xanadu in 1981, which was a
bit like a networked version of the Memex.
Both Gopher and the Web embraced the idea of hypertext. Both allowed users
to follow a conceptual path through a virtual space by following links,
with little need to understand the structure that existed underneath. They
differed considerably, however, in the information architecture that they
established for laying out hyperlinked information. The main difference
between the two is that the HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) of the Web
was built up around documents in HyperText Markup Language (HTML). This
markup language allowed document creators to place links within documents,
whereas Gopher provided pointers to documents through menu files, which
existed separate from the documents themselves. The indexing component
of the two information architectures -- i.e. the part that enumerated
what items existed within the information space and where they could be
found -- thus differed considerably.
The Gopher model assumed a higher number of system administrators,
with low entry costs, to carry out the indexing of files by creating
Gopher menu files that pointed to all the files on a Gopher server
(and often other servers). The Web, on the other hand, assumed fewer
system administrators, with higher entry costs, who were not required
to maintain any sort of index files but instead left that up to the
content authors, who were responsible for creating pointers within the
pages they created. This distinction is often misunderstood, with many
articles describing Gopher in its opposition to hypertext, instead of
recognizing that it is a form of hypertext that is based on external
versus internal indexing.
If we speculate about the counterfactual world in which Gopher beat the
Web for mind share, then it seems the Internet could have moved to a
model in which server administrators were responsible for creating menu
files and identifying and fixing outdated links (most likely by hand and
then automatically as they developed the tools), while authors would
be free to post files to Gopherspace at will. The division of labor
would be quite different from how it currently stands, with server
administration being less about system configuration and maintenance
(which would be less complicated) and more about intellectual control
(which would be more complicated). In many ways, link checking and
organizing would actually be much easier to automate than it currently
is, since it would be more centralized. There would still be distributed
administration and link rot issues but it would be a different model for
the relationship between content and structure, not markup but rather
a large number of tab delimited ASCII databases. This Web has actually
begun to move in the direction recently, with many Web sites providing
their own search engines based on their own inverted files on the server.
Technical inferiority to Mosaic
--------------------------------
Apart from the information architecture, one of the most common
explanations of the Web's victory over Gopher is that Mosaic was just
a much better interface than any existing Gopher clients. It included a
cleaner GUI, viewing images within the text of documents, a back button
that allowed one to return to a page that had just been visited, among
other features. In January of 1994, user survey respondents showed a
strong preference for using a Web browser for Internet exploration,
instead of relying on specific clients like Gopher or WAIS. [Pitkow and
Recker, 1st] and this continued to be the case in three more surveys in
the following two years. [Pitkow and Recker, 3rd], [Pitkow and Recker,
4th], [Pitkow and Recker, 5th] One would naturally assume that this is
largely based on the types of features introduced by Mosaic.
Mosaic was also a "super client," in that one could use it to navigate
over a number of protocols, including FTP, HTTP and Gopher. End users
preferred this to the modular Gopher approach, which assumed that tools
should be small, compact and self-standing, allowing users to mix and
match just the functions they most wanted. Non-technical users, however,
did not want to be bothered with such decisions. There are many examples
of this phenomenon, including the popularity of software that has been
bundled into suites of applications and integrating previously separate
applications into the operating system. It is important to remember,
however, that the Web was not synonymous with Mosaic. Not only could
Mosaic be used to search Gopherspace, but many of the features Mosaic
boasted were also soon available on Gopher clients.
Web's superior infrastructure
------------------------------
The Internet's capacity to serve the needs of Web users quickly became
much better than that for Gopher users. One clear example is Veronica
and Jughead, which allowed indexing of titles only, no full-text
searching. Another major complaint about Veronica was slow access. This
was not based as much on the technology itself as it was on a lack of
buy-in leading to infrastructure. For a long time, there were only two
Veronica servers.
Though there are some who argue that Gopher failed simply because it was
not as extensible as the HTTP protocol, [Khare] I see this as only a small
part of the story. The major issue was not the original configuration of
the protocol but instead the fact that it did not become a test bed. Mind
share moved from Gopher to the Web, leaving only a handful of developers
at the University of Minnesota and a few other places to tweak Gopher
to meet a rapidly increasing demand and level of expectations.
Cheaper computing resources
----------------------------
Increased computing resources clearly reduced the need for a bare-bones
protocol and software. It is for this reason that Gopher was soon
explained as an option primarily for poor institutions that have
not had the opportunity to catch up with technology or government
agencies who are mandated to serve all types of users, even those with
text-only terminals. [Serdar] This begs the question, of course, of why
more features were not built into Gopher to make up for this shift in
demand. The story I provide in the following section attempts to explain
why this was not the case.
Mind Share
=-=-=-=-=-=-
The explanation I advocate is considerably more complicated
than the one provided above. Technological factors are a very important
factor, but not the only factor, in the story I will tell. As mentioned
in the introduction to this paper, neither Gopher nor the Web was simply
a fixed entity to which society reacted. Both continued to undergo
radical changes in functionality, technical support, infrastructure and
content availability between 1990 and the present. Though some of this
transformation can be explained in terms of the inherent attributes of
one technology versus the other, no narrative of Gopher's rise and fall
would be complete without mentioning the people who used, developed and
wrote about the technology.
The importance of these factors is reinforced by posing a simple
counterfactual question: What would have happened if all of the human
resources (in development, content creation and user traffic) that were
thrown at the Web in the early 1990s had instead been thrown at Gopher? Or
stated in the terms of this paper: What would Gopher be like today if
it had captured the mind share that was instead captured by the Web?
A meaningful answer to this question cannot simply be derived from
looking at the current state of technology and then drawing a rigid line
of causation into the past. Using the current state of Gopherspace to
argue for its technologically inevitable demise is tantamount to arguing
for the obvious superiority of VHS over Beta by pointing out how much more
selection of cassettes and players are currently available for the former
format than the latter. There is clearly much more going on in that case
than picture quality and storage capacity. Broad social trends, roughly
what an economist would call "network externalities," play a significant
part in the adoption of one technology over another. I contend that,
much as one brand of blue jeans does not win over more consumers than
another brand simply based on the comfort and durability of its material,
the Web did not overshadow Gopher simply based on the technical qualities
of HTTP as a protocol.
Social Inertia
---------------
An argument for social inertia is a rejection of pure technological
determinism. As with the dominance of VHS over Beta or the QWERTY
keyboard over other layouts, a lot of technological adoption is simply
based on past adoption. Described systematically, this phenomenon has
been labeled "spontaneous self-organization" [Waldrop], "autopoiesis"
[Maturana and Varela] , or "accumulation of design" [Dennet]
In order for complex systems (like Gopher or the Web) to perpetuate
themselves, they must strike the right balance between exploring new
options and exploiting their past success. [Axelrod and Cohen] That
is, they must make new advances to fill new niches that arise without
changing so radically that they can no longer take advantage of their
successful track record. The short answer to the questions posed in this
paper is that the Web did this right, and Gopher did it wrong. Of course,
claiming this is far different from being able to say exactly why Gopher
failed, just as saying someone got checkmated does not provide the most
fulfilling explanation for why someone lost a game of chess.
The literature on complex adaptive systems draws heavily from evolutionary
theory in biology. On a smaller scale, it can be used to explain why
certain technologies are adopted and others are not. Resistance to a
technology can be seen as "a signal of the mismatch of expectations
between users and designers" (33). "The analogy of evolution (mutation,
selection, and retention) on technological change stipulates resistance
as an external factor that selects products and processes over
time. Retrospectively these appear as lines of progression. At the
time the selection process is surprising and subject to attempts to
gain control. Any present range of technical devices and ideas is the
outcome of past resistance which works as a filter: screening out some
items, letting through others, pushing the path of 'progress' into a
particular direction. Technological development is at times gradual,
at times it jumps from one 'punctuated equilibrium' to the other,
depending on large-scale environmental events" (28) [Bauer]
On the positive side, i.e. not rejection of technologies but rather the
adoption of ideas, the study of memetics can be very helpful. Memetics
is the study of how "memes," ideas that act like the conceptual analog
to genes in biology, perpetuate themselves over time. [Dawkins, Selfish
Gene][Dawkins, Blind Watchmaker][Lynch] The idea that Gopher had been
replaced by the Web, for example, can be explained in terms of the
survival success of that idea as a meme. As the Web grew, the content it
provided to users perpetuated the idea, both explicitly and implicitly,
that it had made Gopher obsolete.
These explanations cannot tell the whole story, however, since they fail
to address the question of what started the trend away from Gopher and
toward the Web in the first place. Pure determinism, either technological
or sociological, fails to account for or explain the activities carried
out by specific individuals. [Misa] Though I find systematic explanations
of technological trends useful in identifying the influences involved,
I prefer an explanation that is more clearly grounded in the actions of
specific individuals and organizations. The three interrelated factors
that I have identified are institutional influence, publicity and
open-systems participation.
Institutional influences
-------------------------
The Web had the advantage of coming out of CERN, which is the world's
largest High-Energy Physics (HEP) laboratory. It is funded by 19
European member states and is located near Geneva, with facilities on
both sides of the Swiss-French border. The Web was also in more of a
position to fill the Internet's collaborative and international niche,
since high-energy physics was a process, which required the sharing of
information across boarders. Gopher, on the other hand, was started as a
campus-wide information system (CWIS), which was largely based on getting
access to local resources, like address books and library catalogs.
Mosaic also had the advantage of coming out of NCSA, where many eyes
were looking for innovative developments (9). [Reid] NCSA was one
of the 5 major super computing centers on the NSFNet and had created
Telnet. Any product released by a project there automatically received
attention. The same could not be said for the University of Minnesota,
which was a well-respected academic institution, but not generally seen
as a hotbed of computer innovation.
The Web was thus in a much better position, both socially and
economically, to influence the future direction of the Internet.
Bad publicity
--------------
Public sentiment has a tendency to snowball around specific issues
[MacKay]. Statements made in the public media have a strong influence
on this process. As mentioned above, the Web also had the advantage of
being a medium of expression itself. As more content flooded the Web,
more material was either explicitly or implicitly lauding the virtues
of the Web.
One factor that seems almost comical at first, but may actually have had
a considerable effect on the mind share battle was the simple choice
of names for the two projects. The developers at CERN decided on the
"catchy name" World Wide Web before anyone outside of CERN was even
using the system. [Cailliau] This name immediately brings to mind not
only a global picture but one based on broad networks of interconnected
elements. Gopher, on the other hand, was named after the University of
Minnesota's mascot. Its name was an instant reminder of Gopher's local
institutional origins. It was also often attributed to the protocols
ability to allow users to burrow down into the informational hierarchy
(as gophers burrow down into the earth) and the colloquial label of gopher
for someone whose duty it is to go get things for his or her boss ("go
fer this, go fer that"). Though both of these point out Gopher's useful
ability to retrieve information for its users, neither one exactly brings
forth images of cutting edge technology. If anything, they reminded one
of the numerous cute and cuddly images of gophers that accompanied almost
every article that discussed the protocol.
This points out the much more general issue of the Web's advocates
describing it as a diverse global network of idea exchange and Gopher's
advocates generally describing it as a useful CWIS based on familiar
metaphors, such as FTP and the filing system of common operating
systems. The rhetoric of the two groups became largely what Donald
MacKenzie calls a "self-fulfilling prophecy." [MacKenzie] They defined
the niche, and the technology then proceeded to fill it.
The following NCSA statement from 1993 clearly demonstrates the effective
rhetoric put forth on the part of the Web:
NCSA is currently developing a new software tool, NCSA Mosaic,
that will encompass all of the currently used global information
systems and provide greatly increased functionality and ease of
access to the Internet-based universal information space. NCSA
Mosaic is a distributed hypermedia information system based on
the World Wide Web technology originated by CERN. Mosaic provides
a unified, coherent, hypermedia-based portal to the expanding
Internet information space by enabling transparent access to all
of the major information systems currently in use on the network
(Gopher, WAIS, anonymous FTP, Archie, Usenet news, etc.). By virtue
of its World Wide Web basis, Mosaic also provides a unique, flexible
and important networked information functionality not available
in other existing systems -- distributed hypermedia. In addition,
Mosaic provides user- and community-level annotation and hyperlink
support for collaborative work based on information accessible on
the network. Mosaic is being developed across the X Window System,
Macintosh and Microsoft Windows environments. Mosaic was originally
conceived as an asynchronous collaboration system -- an environment
for geographically distributed group or community members to operate
on a common networked information base as part of their everyday work
Current and future development will focus on enabling and expanding
capabilities for information sharing, collaborative navigation and
local information space construction across the global information
space. Mosaic already supports extensive local information space
customization methods, including text and audio annotations that
can be attached transparently to any document available from any
information source on the Internet. Future efforts will evolve this
into a general system for sharing annotation, hyperlink, and document
and information space construction activities across small and large
groups and communities alike. As a result of these efforts, Mosaic
and the Internet will become a flexible, malleable, and extensible
information and collaboration system for a wide variety of uses
by a large number of people, both independently and in groups and
organizations. [Wilson and Mittelhauser]
The rhetoric of Mosaic as a "killer app" was also much more appealing than
either HTTP or Gopher as a "killer protocol," even though the latter is
more accurate. Gopher was increasingly seen and described as the client
software and not the protocol, thus Mosaic was a replacement, not just
a browsers that could handle multiple protocols through a GUI. Since
users tend to only recognize features, not the back end that makes them
possible, Mosaic was naturally associated with both the Web and the GUI,
leaving users to see Gopher as the "app" of yesterday.
Coverage in the popular media changed dramatically during the rise
and fall of Gopher. Though it is difficult to determine which had more
influence upon the other, the rise and fall of support for Gopher in the
media matches up very closely with the rise and fall of its Internet
traffic. In March 1993, one author stated, "Using client software on
your local computer you can move around the Gopher environment via a
hierarchical menu system in a seamless fashion." "Judging by the speed
with which this Gopher resource discovery technology is being adopted,
it will surely become a widespread method of access in the future"
(53). [Simmonds] Such accounts were quickly overshadowed, however, by
claims such as the one in December of 1993 by The New York Times that
Mosaic was "an application so different and so obviously useful that it
can create a new industry from scratch" (17). [Reid]
By February of 1994, readers were told, "While the Gopher system is
probably at the peak of its popularity, the World Wide Web (WWW or W3)
is now gaining in popularity as a system for publishing electronic
information" (59). Gopher is "extremely easy to use and not difficult
to maintain" but "poorly documented" (65) and the "menu system is very
restrictive" and lacks support for URLs. Thus "Gopher will eventually
become merely another information resource accessible by the World Wide
Web." "Gopher is established, and is unlikely to change. World Wide
Web, while supporting access to all of the existing electronic resource
types, is a new frontier. Libraries may present information in any way
they like." "This system is so versatile and configurable that the only
boundary is the author's imagination" (66). [Powell] The New Hacker's
Dictionary also stated in 1994 that Gopher was "being obsolesced by
the World Wide Web." [Raymond] In a 1995 book, Gopher was described as
"another extension to ftp" (230) [Salus]. August 1995 source explained,
"After the development of WWW (and the WWW browsers), Gopher became
somewhat obsolete. Today, more than 70% of the gopher menus are also
provided as WWW pages." [Serdar] In a popular book published in 1996
on the history of computers, Gopher is only peripherally mentioned as
a stepping stone toward the Web, which is the current contender for
becoming the "world brain" that so many theorists have dreamed about
(297-8). [Campbell-Kelly and Aspray]
With a very few exceptions [Hansen], later documentation of Gopher
describes it as a technological has-been, making statements like the
following:
August 1996, "Prior to the World Wide Web, the best information
searching system was Gopher... While Gopher has been replaced
by Web search engines in popularity, a lot of good information
still exists on Gopher servers and most Web browsers allow Gopher
searching." [Brown] Jan 1998, "Before the Web, Gopher was the easiest
way to find information." [College of Lake County] June 1998, "Gopher
was the first easy to learn and use protocol that opened the Internet
to everyone, until the massive growth in popularity of the World
Wide Web in 1994 replaced the gopher as the leading interface for
navigating the nets." [Howe, "What is a Gopher?"] Current source,
"With the ascendance of the Web, most Gopher databases are being
converted to Web sites which can be more easily accessed via Web
search engines."[PC Webopaedia] Current source, "Before the arrival of
the Web, gopher sites were the greatest thing to hit the 'net since,
well, the 'net itself. While not as popular today, developers looking
to round out their selection of Internet services will want to give
consideration" to Gopher servers. ["FTP/Gopher Servers"]
Failure to follow the open systems model
-----------------------------------------
An open systems model can take on two different but very interrelated
parts: open communications standards and open source software. The two
work best when implemented together [Stoltz]. In both cases, the Web
development team did a better job than did the Gopher team.
Successful open-source development can be understood by Richard Gabriel's
claim that "the right thing" design approach, tends to lose to "worse is
better." [Gabriel] That is, developers should release their software to
the public early in the process in order to gain adherents and then let
a larger development community make improvements to the code. The Gopher
team put too much burden on themselves for providing innovations to the
protocol, servers software, etc. They decided that they would decide what
the "right thing" was, instead of unleashing these decisions on others.
This had the practical shortcoming of significantly reducing the
number of people who could be working to make necessary changes to
Gopher. Open-source software advocates such as Eric Raymond explain that
opening up a development effort has profound human resources advantages
over a more centralized approach. Not only will users of any successful
computer technology always outnumber the people who created it, but they
also have a strong incentive to make improvements to the tools that they
themselves use regularly. [Raymond, "Cathedral"]
In addition to these practical concerns, there was also a political
element to open-source software development, represented by such spokesmen
as Richard Stallman. In 1983, Stallman founded the GNU (GNU's Not Unix)
Project and wrote the "GNU Manifesto" to justify and gain support for his
development of a free Unix-compatible operating system. In it, he stated,
"I cannot in good conscience sign a nondisclosure agreement or a software
license agreement." [Stallman]
Such arguments had significant support in the hacker community, and when
word got out that Gopher would require the payment of a licensing fee
for hosts with a .com domain but not those with an .edu domain, there
were many developers who were turned off by Gopher. This licensing
controversy sent the message of rejecting the open-source model. The
issue was more than just being "commercial" (as were Archie, WAIS, Mosaic,
and other tools) but rather not being open during the development phase
for the protocol. This was a violation of the hacker ethic. [Raymond,
"How to"] [Levy] Not that they were attempting to make money off Gopher
but rather that they were violating the trust of those who would like to
use and tinker with the code by creating an artificial line in the sand
between educational and commercial uses.Tim Berners-Lee attributes this
turn of events with a lot of weight in development of the two protocols:
"The Internet Gopher was seen for a long time as a preferable information
system, avoiding the complexities of HTML, but rumors of the technology
being licensable provoked a general re-evaluation." [Berners-Lee,
August 1996]
By failing to bring developers under its fold, the Gopher project fell
victim to what is often referred to as forking, i.e. splintering into
many options instead of settling on one standard approach. Forking can be
effective, but only after enough support has been created that the forked
technology can stand on its own, without the help of those working on
the technology from which it forked. Netscape is a significant case of
later breaking from standards leading to forking, in the form of HTML
extensions. [Newman] Microsoft's Internet Explorer also jumped in with
its own nonstandard extensions. But this happened after the Web had
already gained enough inertia to have a strong user and developer base.
One example of forking away from Gopher too early is Panda, developed
by twelve developers at the University of Iowa. Panda was a single,
integrated client to the Internet. It handled Gopher, FTP, UseNet,
World-Wide-Web, and a host of other protocols. It included custom
servers for the Internet, including a Raccoon conferencing server (an
overblown BBS server), an Aardvark account management server, and a
Parrot multi-user real-time conferencing server. Lee Brintle founded
Project Panda, Inc as a non-profit company in fall of 1992, and it
lasted until June of 1995. [Brintle, personal homepage], [Brintle,
"Panda"] Nothing was contributed back to the Gopher project.
HTTP, on the other hand, got buy-in from the computer world before Mosaic
was released, thus preventing the forking that Gopher experienced. The
Web's technology was also quickly opened up to the larger development
community. In 1994, any control CERN had over the project was quickly
abandoned. The CERN Council approved the construction of the LHC
accelerator. This Large Hadron Collider made it impossible for CERN to
continue deep involvement in the Web technological development. [Cailliau]
In addition to not effectively distributing its development efforts
through code sharing, the Gopher team also did not play the Internet
standards game as well as the Web community did. Formally established
in January of 1986, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is the
protocol engineering and development arm of the Internet. In order to
garner mind share among the development community, it is important
to take part in the IETF's procedures, including the publication of
Internet-Drafts and Requests for Comment (RFCs). This process allows the
wider community to critically review the development process. The Gopher
team did release a Request for Comments (#1436) in 1993 [Anklesaria,
et al] but it was informational, not standards-track. And they failed to
follow up on this RFC with publications of additional proposed changes
to Gopher.
As mentioned above, instead of attending more general meetings, the Gopher
community also split off, holding its own GopherCon'92 conference [Riddle]
attended by 50 people. This was a positive step, but it simply did not
foster the mind share that would have been possible through participation
in wider development community events.
Conclusion
===========
The story of Gopher's rise and fall is both fascinating and complex.
Important influences in the process were both technological and
sociological. This paper does not provide any one definitive answer to
why history played itself out asit did. Instead, I have attempted to
refute the very notion that such aunitary answer is either desirable or
possible. I have found the concept of mind share to be a useful way of
presenting the influences involvedwithout the need to commit to a specific
causal chain of events. My hope is that the result can contribute
positively to the ongoing historical dialog on why the Internet that so
many of us use developed in the way it did.
* When interpreting Internet traffic statistics, it is important to
remember that navigating the Web generally involves many more data
objects (HTML files, images, and numerous other inline inclusions) than
does navigating Gopherspace. Usage statistics based on either packets or
bytes transferred will thus tend to overestimate the use of the Web and
underestimate the use of Gopher. It is important to remember, however,
that these NSF statistics were often cited during the period addressed in
this paper. Even if they are not completely accurate in their reflection
of Internet usage, these statistics contributed to the public perception
that the Web was taking the place of Gopher. [Return to text] References
Anklesaria, Farhad, et al. "The Internet Gopher Protocol (a distributed
document search and retrieval protocol)." Request for Comments 1436. March
1993. ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/rfc1436.txt
Axelrod, Robert and Cohen, Michael Cohen. Harnessing Complexity. Draft,
September 1998.
Bauer, Martin."Resistance to new technology and its effects on nuclear
power, information technology and biotechnology." In Resistance to New
Technology: Nuclear Power, Information Technology and Biotechnology.
Edited by Martin Bauer. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997. 1-41
Berners-Lee, Tim. "The World Wide Web: Past, Present and Future." August
1996. http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/1996/ppf.html
Brintle, Lee. "Panda." In alt.gopher. 5 May 1992. Archived at
http://www1.lu.se/msdosftp/network/winsock/compound/panda/general.txt
Brintle, Lee. Personal Homepage. http://www.leepfrog.com/~lbrintle/
Brown Computer Solutions. "Web Words - Gopher." Last updated 5 August
1996. http://www.browncs.com/gopher.html
Bush, Vannevar. "As We May Think." Atlantic Monthly 176 (1945): 101-8.
Caillliau, Robert. "A Short History of the Web." November 1995.
http://www.inria.fr/Actualites/Cailliau-fra.html
Campbell-Kelly, Martin and Aspray, William. Computer: A History of the
Information Machine. New York: Basic Books, 1996.
College of Lake County. "Gopher - Introduction." Last updated 16 January
1998. http://www.clc.cc.il.us/home/com589/gopher.htm
Dawkins, Richard. The Blind Watchmaker. New York: W.W. Norton, 1987.
Dawkins, Richard. The Selfish Gene. Oxford: Oxford University, 1976.
Dennet, Daniel Dawin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of
Life. New York: Touchstone, 1996.
Dervin, Brenda. "Chaos, Order, and Sense-Making: A
Proposed Theory for Information Design." Draft. 6 March
1995. http://edfu.lis.uiuc.edu/allerton/95/s5/dervin.draft.html
Digital Equipment Corporation. "Sharing File Services Across UNIX and
Windows NT." http://www.digital.com/allconnect/acwp1.htm
"FTP/Gopher Servers." ServerWatch. Updated daily as of this
writing. http://serverwatch.internet.com/ftpservers2.html
Gabriel, Richard P. "Lisp: Good News, Bad News, How to Win Big."
1991. http://www.naggum.no/worse-is-better.html
Georgia Institute of Technology, Graphics, Visualization & Usability
Center. " NSFNET Backbone Traffic Distribution by Service." April
1995. http://www.cc.gatech.edu/gvu/stats/NSF/9504.html
"gopher." In PC Webopaedia. Last modified 19 June
1997. http://webopedia.internet.com/TERM/g/gopher.html
Hafner, Katie and Lyon, Matthew. Where Wizards Stay up Late: The Origins
of the Internet. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996.
Hansen, Mikael. "The Internet: culture, computer, gopher." Last updated
26 March 1996. http://www.dnai.com/~meh/interviews/gopher/english/
Howe, Walt. "A Brief History of the Internet." Last updated 24 October
1998. http://www0.delphi.com/navnet/faq/history.html#gopher
Howe, Walt. "What is a Gopher?" Delphi FAQs. Last updated 22 June 1998.
http://www0.delphi.com/navnet/faq/gopher.html
Internet Engineering Task Force http://www.ietf.org
Internet Society. http://www.isoc.org/
Khare, Rohit. "Who Killed Gopher? An Extensible Murder Mystery."
23 December 1998. http://www.ics.uci.edu/~rohit/IEEE-L7-http-gopher.html
Kuhlthau, Carol C. "Information Needs and Information Seeking." 16-17
February 1996. http://www.gslis.ucla.edu/DL/kuhlthau.html.
Levy, Steven. Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution. New York:
Dell, 1984.
Lynch, Aaron. Thought Contagion: How Belief Spreads Through Society. New
York: BasicBooks, 1996.
MacKay, Charles. Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of
Crowds. London: Richard Bentley, 1841.
MacKenzie, Donald. "Economic and Sociological Explanations of
Technological Change." In Knowing Machines. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
1996.
Maturana, H. and Varela, F. Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization
of the Living. Dordecht, Holland: D. Reidel, 1980.
Misa, Thomas J. "Retrieving Sociotechnical Change from Technological
Determinism."
National Center for Supercomputing
Applications. http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/ncsa.html
Newman, Nathan. "The Origins and Future of Open Source Software:
A NetAction White Paper" 1999. http://www.netaction.org/opensrc/future/
Pitkow, James E. "Third Degree Polynomial Curve Fitting for
Bytes Transferred Per Month By Service." Georgia Institute
of Technology, Graphics, Visualization & Usability Center.
http://www.cc.gatech.edu/gvu/stats/NSF/Extrap.GIF
Pitkow, James E. "Relation Between Bytes & Packets Transferred
Per Month By ServiceThird Degree Polynomial Curve Fitting for
Bytes Transferred Per Month By Service." Georgia Institute
of Technology, Graphics, Visualization & Usability Center.
http://www.cc.gatech.edu/gvu/stats/NSF/Both.GIF and
http://www.cc.gatech.edu/gvu/stats/NSF/BothP.GIF
Pitkow, James E. and Recker, Margaret M. "Results From The
First World-Wide Web User Survey." Georgia Institute of
Technology, Graphics, Visualization & Usability Center.
http://www.cc.gatech.edu/gvu/user_surveys/survey-01-1994/survey-paper.html
Pitkow, James E. and Recker, Margaret M. "Results From
The Third World-Wide Web User Survey." Georgia Institute
of Technology, Graphics, Visualization & Usability
Center. http://www.cc.gatech.edu/gvu/user_surveys/survey-04-1995/
Pitkow, James E. and Recker, Margaret M. "Results From The
Fourth World-Wide Web User Survey." Georgia Institute
of Technology, Graphics, Visualization & Usability
Center. http://www.cc.gatech.edu/gvu/user_surveys/survey-10-1995/
Pitkow, James E. and Recker, Margaret M. "Results From
The Fifth World-Wide Web User Survey." Georgia Institute
of Technology, Graphics, Visualization & Usability
Center. http://www.cc.gatech.edu/gvu/user_surveys/survey-04-1996/
Powell, James. "Adventures with the World Wide Web: Creating a Hypertext
Library Information System." Database (February 1994): 59-60, 62-66.
Raymond, Eric. "The Cathedral and the Bazaar." 22
November 1998 (with numerous revisions
since). http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/
Raymond, Eric. "How to Become a Hacker." Last updated 26 March 1999.
http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html
Raymond, Eric, ed. The New Hacker's Dictionary. Version
4.0.0. http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/jargon/jargon_22.html#SEC29
Reid, Robert H. Architects of the Web: 1,000 Days that Built the Future
of Business. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1997.
Riddle, Prentiss. "GopherCon '92: Trip report." In
comp.infosystems.gopher. 17 August 1992. Archived at
http://iubio.bio.indiana.edu:70/R0-22906-/IUBio-Software+Data/util/gopher/gopher
con1.txt
Salus, Peter H. Casting the Net: From ARPANET to Internet and
Beyond. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1995, 230.
Serdar, Cenk. "Gopher." In Internet Tutorial
for the Wharton MBA Program. 3 August
1995. http://opim.wharton.upenn.edu/~serdar93/internet/gopher.html
Simmonds, Curtis. "Searching Internet Archive Sites with Archie: Why,
What, Where, and How." Online (March 1993): 50, 52-5.
Sonnenreich, Wes. "A History of Search Engines." Last updated 3
April 1998. http://www.wiley.com/compbooks/sonnenreich/history.html
Stallman, Richard. "The GNU Manifesto." 1985.
http://www.fsf.org/gnu/manifesto.html
Stoltz, Mitch. "The Case for Government Promotion of
Open Source Software: A NetAction White Paper." 1999.
http://www.netaction.org/opensrc/oss-whole.html
Treese, Win. The Internet Index 1 (8 July 1993, revised 7 January
1994). http://www.openmarket.com/intindex/93-12.htm
Treese, Win. The Internet Index 2 (2 August
1994). http://www.openmarket.com/intindex/94-08.htm
Treese, Win. The Internet Index 3 (17 September 1994, revised 19 September
1994). http://www.openmarket.com/intindex/94-09.htm
Treese, Win. The Internet Index 5 (31 December
1994). http://www.openmarket.com/intindex/94-12.htm
Treese, Win. The Internet Index 7 (28 April
1995). http://www.openmarket.com/intindex/95-04.htm
Treese, Win. The Internet Index 22 (31 May
1998). http://www.openmarket.com/intindex/98-05.htm
University of Houston Gopher. gopher://info.lib.uh.edu:70/
University of Minnesota Gopher. gopher://tc.umn.edu:70/
Waldrop, M. Mitchell. Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of
Order and Chaos. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994.
Wilson, Chris and Mittelhauser, Jon. "Developing Global HyperMedia:
The NCSA Mosaic System." Proceedings of ACM Hypertext'93, Demonstrations
(1993): 13.
Wilson, David L. "Portals seen as huge money maker,
but some aren't so sure." San Jose Mercury News (28 June
1998).http://www1.sjmercury.com/business/center/portal062998.htm
Winograd, Terry and Flores, Fernando. Understanding Computers and
Cognition: A New Foundation for Design. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1987.
World Wide Web Consortium. http://www.w3.org/ Revision History
23 April 1999 - Original version 4 November 2001 - Corrected several
spelling and grammatical errors 25 April 2008 - Fixed several
broken images