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, @02:18PM
The problem with it is that even after many years you still can't build the system on itself. From time to time I give it a try. Last check was a year ago, one of the most important software for it (glibc, which is even GNU software) can't be build on GNU/Hurd without using external patches (which are hard to find in all the outdated documentation).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 13 2016, @07:05PM
It's GNU Hurd and it's GNU/Linux because GNU Hurd is genuine GNU software and Linux is not GNU.
The reason the Hurd has problems after all these years is all the people who could have worked on it chose Linux instead, and the work never got done.
(Score: 2) by Marand on Saturday August 13 2016, @10:36PM
The reason the Hurd has problems after all these years is all the people who could have worked on it chose Linux instead, and the work never got done.
That's a popular excuse, but according to Hurd's own history page [gnu.org], work on choosing or creating a GNU-approved kernel started back in 1986. A barely functional Linux didn't appear until late 1991, five years later. In that time, it went from "we'll use TRIX" to BSD 4.4-Lite [groklaw.net] before RMS decided Mach was the only option. (Also of note is that trend continued after Linux's existence, as well, with multiple attempts at using different kernels in place of Mach over the years since.)
It's easy to blame Linux, but if the GNU folks had just chosen something, anything, and started working instead of five years of design-by-committee, they probably would have been the ones with the developer effort and Linux would be the also-ran. Someone [wikipedia.org] made a kernel from ground-up in a fraction of the time it took the GNU folks to just make a decision and start hacking.