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.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 13 2016, @03:00PM
It's funny how the reaction of the Univ. of Minnesota brass to "their" viral Internet software was pretty much the same as how Univ. of Illinois Urbana-Champage reacted when the developers of the Mosaic web browser left to from Netscape (orig. Mosaic Computer Corporation).
Hey, these kids were educated in our classrooms and developed this software using our equipment. It doesn't matter that they did it on their own time and initiative. IT'S UNIVERSITY PROPERTY!