It is not uncommon to surprise yourself discovering that The technologies that are part of our day-to-day life were at the time mere minority alternatives to other, apparently more consolidated, but that practically nobody remembers anymore.
It happened to VHS (until it finally swept the Betamax format from the market) … and also the same thing happened to the WWW. But you probably don’t even know what technology was predominant then, before the rise of the ‘http: // www.‘.
When Gopher Ruled Earth (digital)
In 1991, while Tim Berners-Lee was still designing his project for a ‘World Wide Web’ based on the HTTP protocol, four researchers from the University of Minnesota led by Mark P. McCahill, the inventor of URLs, introduced the world to the Gopher protocol (named after a cute North American rodent).
Its objective? Facilitate the distribution, search and retrieval of information online to users who, until then, only relied on FTP repositories and historical BBSs (based on the Telnet protocol).
And do it, in addition, in such a way that the load for both the server and the client was minimal, in such a way that it allowed to use small personal PCs for both tasks, without requiring the use of heavy mainframes.
Thus, Gopher was not only capable of serving as a gateway to the servers of the two aforementioned protocols, but it also facilitated access to the thousands of information servers (mostly university) with which the Internet already had at the time.
Its operation was based on present users with menus made up of directories, subdirectories, and articles (which could be HTML, like now, or text) or downloadable files, as a filesystem.
Gopher quickly grew so large that, in 1992, two researchers at the Univ. Of Nevada launched the first great internet search engine, Veronica (retroacronym of English * ‘Very Easy Rodent-Oriented Netwide Index to Computerized Archives’ *), able to search the entire ‘gopheresphere’.
The reserved port for gopher connections is 70, just as 80 is for HTTP
A very short reign
However, the following year, three events that would end up triggering the end of Gopher’s three-year reign and its replacement by the HTTP protocol of the WWW:
On April 30, when Berners-Lee judged that had sufficiently matured his project of a ‘World Wide Web’ based on hypertext, CERN presented it publicly.
Around the same time, the NSCA launched Mosaic, the first graphical web browser in history. And while it was compatible with the Gopher protocol, it emphasized HTTP technologies, which contributed to the new audience jumping on the Internet bandwagon. view Gopher as a mere subset of the WWW.
The University of Minnesota had the brilliant idea of requiring institutions that somehow profited from Gopher to start paying a fee for licensing the necessary technology. And he did it in such an aggressive way that it sowed mistrust even among non-commercial institutions.
Thus, even though the first versions of Mozilla and Microsoft browsers were, like Mosaic, also compatible with Gopher, in a very few years they stopped supporting the dying protocol.
But the above was not the only reason that caused Gopher to be erased from the map: it was also It is essential that the new WWW focus on the publication of content, not on its hierarchical and orderly consultation —So suitable for college settings.
In 1991, limited bandwidth did not allow one to dream of offering an online multimedia experience. But that changed quickly and by then Berners-Lee’s proposal made it possible to offer a much more attractive user experience than Gopher’s —Thanks, for example, to its support for Javascript and Java applets.
In McCahill’s words,
“What was going through the head of many people was not” I want to go to the library “but, on the contrary,” look what a great platform for advertising and business! “, And we did not understand it until the ball it had been at stake for some time. “
“Although one of the reasons it doesn’t bother me that the WWW ended up beating Gopher is that I don’t have things like Facebook and their surveillance platform loading directly onto my conscience.”
Is Gopher a thing of the past?
In any case, Gopher is not completely dead: there are still some servers that use it, most of them in the ‘geek’ and / or university field, and specialized software, compatible with it. In addition, there are two great options to make use of it from our usual web browsers:
Make use of a ‘HTTP-Gopher gateway‘which, as a proxy, translates the gopher traffic to HTML / HTTP. GopherProxy and Floodgap.com are two good options.
Use browser extensions (Chrome, Firefox and compatible) and / or the Android app from the Overbite project, also linked to Floodgap.
There is also a project underway to spread the use of a new protocol, the Gemini, which is intended to be a gopher update. There is even software that allows you to create dual Gopher / Gemini servers, such as GeGoBi.
There is a small, but growing, community of Internet users who continue to dream of a lighter and safer Internet, less focused on advertising and less dependent on APIs. Some of them resort to somewhat eccentric measures, such as creating PDF-based websites … but, for others, Gopher (either directly, or through its successor, still has a lot of future ahead of it).
In the words of Cameron Kaiser, one of the biggest Gopher advocates in decades (and maintainer of the aforementioned Floodgap):
“Maybe it’s time you took a trip back underground to take a look at that simpler, cleaner world that was once the Internet.”