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The Rise and Fall of the Gopher Protocol

posted by n1 on Saturday August 13 2016, @06:47AM   Printer-friendly
from the what-could-have-been dept.

canopic jug writes:

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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  • (Score: 1) by tbuskey on Saturday August 13 2016, @12:21PM

    by tbuskey (6127) on Saturday August 13 2016, @12:21PM (#387470)

    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

    by Francis (5544) on Saturday August 13 2016, @03:10PM (#387508)

    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.