Gopher Novice - Part VII.
=========================
Cont. [Gopher Novice - Part VI]
I missed on [Bob Alberti's Gopher Directory] (co-author of Internet
Gopher) information about his article from 2011, titled [Internet Gopher:
The Bridge to the Web]. Today is time for reading it.
What was the Internet like?
---------------------------
``
The Internet had by 1991 [...] The quarter million hosts with domain
names ending in ".edu" (indicating colleges, universities, and other
educational institutions) still outnumbered all others including
commercial hosts ending in ".com."
``
[...] we put the source code up on the FTP server on
boombox.micro.umn.edu (Boombox) and informed colleagues at other
institutions about its availability. Remember in those days the only
way to retrieve something from the Internet was to know its address
in advance, so the only way for information about the availability of
Gopher's source code to spread via Usenet conferencing (Anklesaria F. ,
2011), e-mail discussion lists or verbally.
``
[...] While the Gopher Team wrote all our own code, we received
bug reports from the community, discussed feature ideas and worked
to integrate with standards and much more. Communication was over
e-mail and Usenet first in the alt.gopher newsgroup and later on
comp.infosystems.gopher.
``
[...] Nowadays client-server architecture is ubiquitous, but in 1991
the growth of the Internet (e.g. servers) and the increase in power
of the personal computer (clients) had developed to the point where
client-server architecture was increasingly feasible.
``
[...] In order to understand Gopher's significance and its impact
on contemporary computing in 1991, it is important to understand
the environment from which it emerged. In 1991, computers were the
realm of academics and hobbyists, and the landscape of services and
connections was much more fractured and difficult to navigate than it
is today. Connectivity was primarily provided by modems with speeds
ranging from 300 to 2400 baud (Daxial Communications, 2003). E-mail was
granular within institutions to the level of individual departmental
mail server – you couldn't write to "
[email protected]," and
there were no on-line directories. Most interpersonal contact was
by reading Usenet, which was an increasingly unwieldy1 database of
interest-based forums distributed via NNTP protocol (Kantor & Lapsley,
1986) to a growing number of servers around the Internet.
``
[...] The primary means of moving files was over File Transfer Protocol
(FTP) (Postel, 1980). FTP's stateful architecture and unusual two-port
communications protocol is an artifact of its antiquity. FTP was
developed back when there were no personal computers, only mainframe
computers and dumb terminals, or maxi-Hosts and TIPs respectively in
the original ARPANET design (Edmondson- Yurkanan, 2002). [...] Modern
FTP software has addressed these challenges by writing smarter, more
powerful client software that would have been impossible back when
we were developing Gopher.
So we can saw the picture of the educational institutions which are
using the Internet in the old-school way. There are no imagination
of pleasures, but hard work with every aspect of communication. Slow
connection, limited hardware resources, primary tools and protocols. The
Internet where you must know what to do. It could be surprising that
the most advanced form of communication provide Usenet. I understand it
as self organising people in their spare time, and beyond a dominant
influence of serious institutions. The worth saying is also some ban
for commercial use of the Internet's public infrastructure.
How the Internet was organised?
-------------------------------
``
[...] Additionally, FTP had no means to refer users to other FTP
locations, and this was a critical difference between Gopher and FTP
``
[...] The overall impact of the Gopher architecture cannot be
overstated – abstracted data access and fast performance made
Gopher significantly more user-friendly than anything that had yet
been seen. And its deliberately lean client-server design allowed for
an acceptable user experience even on computers employing connections
as slow as 300 baud.
Beyond Usenet, the Internet of 90's was hidden behind of some curtain
and tools made it difficult to take advantage of "net". It's good point,
I didn't think before, that FTP can't link other FTP. Information can't
flow in natural way.
Gopher escape
--------------
``
[...] Gopher dropped like a seed crystal into the supersaturated
information solution of the Internet, and over the next two years
gained broad and enthusiastic acceptance, particularly among
computer experts as well as information scientists (colloquially,
"librarians") who sought to ensure that Gopher facilitated formal
information sciences methods and notations (Dalton, 1991). By 1993
Internet Gopher escaped the communities of computer mavens and
librarians and emerged into popular culture
``
[...] Gopher broke through to the popular consciousness following
a write-up in the London Guardian in August of 1993 (Flowers,
1993). A LexisNexis search for "Internet Gopher" turns up over a dozen
articles in 1993 and 1994 published in such diverse periodicals as the
Washington Post (Williams, 1995), The Age (Melbourne) (Watson & Barry,
1995), the Business Times of Singapore (Leong, 1994), and Newsweek
(Watson & Barry, 1995).
I'm noting that for further reading. It could be interesting to read
articles from 1993-1995. It's the most interesting thing to me to find
a way how the average usage of the Internet was in time when Gopher
"escaped" from that serious world of educational institutions.
Gopher decline
--------------
``
[...] However, I disagree with the conventional wisdom that the
licensing issue was the cause, or even a major cause, of Gopher's
demise. While I agree with Cal Lee that Gopher lost critical
"mindshare" over the licensing issue (Lee, 1999), I don't believe
that the licensing controversy was the major factor in Gopher's demise.
``
[...] Finally, and most important in my estimation as to why the
popularity of Internet Gopher declined, was the introduction in
late 1994 of the V.34 28.8K baud modem (Figure 16). This was double
the speed of V.33 14.4K baud introduced in 1991 (International
Telecommunications Union, 2009). And as the V.34 modems were bundled
with booming PC sales, their adoption was rapid. [...] By contrast,
Gopher had been written to be extremely speedy: its text-only displays
required only a fraction of the bandwidth that a Web page required.
One of the most popular argument against Gopher success is licensing
issue. But above explanation appeals to me more. So users can use their
powerful home computers, and their speedy modems to do more than everyone
could imagine a year before, leaving behind the academic community.
~ [Gopher Novice - Part VI]:
gopher://sdf.org:70/0/users/szczezuja/novice/2021-08-30-Gopher-novice-part-vi.txt
~ [Bob Alberti's Gopher Directory]:
gopher://sdf.org:70/1/users/alberti
~ [Internet Gopher: The Bridge to the Web]:
https://ia802801.us.archive.org/9/items/internet_gopher_bridge_to_the_web/Internet-Gopher-Alberti.pdf
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