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Right before HTTP took off in the early 1990's, there was Gopher and for a while it, too, was growing exponentially. It was fast and hosted text, source code, graphics, and any number of other types of files, just not all mixed together in one and the same document. For a while it was winning out over HTTP and making grounds against FTP. But that changed eventually and the rest is history. The MinnPost goes a bit into the history of Gopher with the Rise and Fall of the Gopher Protocol.
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The Rise and Fall of the Gopher Protocol
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New crypt. See /usr/news/crypt.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 13 2016, @09:54AM
Maybe so, but at least I recognize that FOSS does not make success. Luck makes success. Torvalds is a lucky asshole who wrote a kernel "for fun" not intending to do something "big and professional like GNU." And then look what happened to GNU as all the young trendy college students of the day flipped off old hippie RMS to use Linux instead.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by stormwyrm on Saturday August 13 2016, @10:29AM
For software like Gopher that is meant to run on networks, being open is a necessary (although certainly not a sufficient) condition for success. Making a networked system proprietary is a recipe for a niche protocol at best. If the Gopher guys had opened their software then perhaps that they might not have needed to worry overmuch about funding for Gopher development as they did at the time, and their protocol would have been the dominant one and HTTP the historical curiosity.
And by the way, Microsoft partly gained the dominance that they achieved by for a time turning a blind eye to unauthorised copying of their software: "Although about 3 million computers get sold every year in China, people don't pay for the software. Someday they will, though. And as long as they're going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They'll get sort of addicted, and then we'll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade." -- Bill Gates, sometime in 1998. So even they created a quasi-open system of sorts to make sure that their system became de facto standard. If they had clamped down on unauthorised copying as heavily as the law would have permitted them to do, then the face of computing might well be very different.
Numquam ponenda est pluralitas sine necessitate.
(Score: 2, Informative) by stormwyrm on Saturday August 13 2016, @10:42AM
Numquam ponenda est pluralitas sine necessitate.
(Score: 1) by tbuskey on Saturday August 13 2016, @12:21PM
Maybe so, but at least I recognize that FOSS does not make success. Luck makes success. Torvalds is a lucky asshole who wrote a kernel "for fun" not intending to do something "big and professional like GNU." And then look what happened to GNU as all the young trendy college students of the day flipped off old hippie RMS to use Linux instead.
As one of those students at the time, I was more pragmatic. I had DOS and MacOS 7. Sometimes Windows 3.1. I wanted to use Unix tools. Some had been ported to DOS (the GNUish tools) or there were lookalikes like freemacs, elvis, microemacs, shells, etc that had limitations (64k of text/data) or didn't work like the real versions. I had Minix, but that couldn't run real emacs and had the same limits due to the 64k I&D memory model.
386BSD from the Jolitzes came out & was documented in Dr. Dobbs. I tried that but it wouldn't boot on my system. So I tried Linux and it worked. Emacs and all the tools ran on my 8mb systems. If I had waited, maybe I would've tried FreeBSD, but it was too late. Torvalds was lucky.
(Score: 1) by Francis on Saturday August 13 2016, @03:10PM
Not really. Linux enthusiasts went out of their way to promote the crap out of the system. They also spread a ton of FUD during AT&T's lawsuit against BSDi in an effort to scare people away from using BSD.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 13 2016, @05:52PM
as all the young trendy college students of the day flipped off old hippie RMS to use Linux instead.
Instead? Obviously you know nothing about Linux, RMS, GNU or WTF and hippies. Are you a young and non-trendy college student?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 13 2016, @06:59PM
I was a non-trendy college student when GNU Hurd was new. I installed the Hurd on a top of the line Pentium II. I especially liked the idea of running anonymous processes or processes with multiple user ids, because I never liked Unix groups. And I thought GNU was going to be great, as soon as more than a few people started using it. But nobody did. WTF dude, they said, you should use Linux, because Linux is better at everything all the time. Linux is the shit and nothing beats it. Linux, Linux, Linux, Linux! Even RMS gave up and realized that GNU would never be finished because the Linux trolls took over.