Re: Where Have all the Gophers Gone? Why the Web beat Gopher in the Battle for Protocol Mind Share

From	Michael Black <et472@ncf.ca>
Newsgroups	comp.misc
Subject	Re: Where Have all the Gophers Gone? Why the Web beat Gopher in the Battle for Protocol Mind Share
Date	2016-01-25 10:55 -0500
Organization	National Capital Freenet, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
Message-ID	<alpine.LNX.2.02.1601251052160.9361@darkstar.example.org> (permalink)
References	<TtWQ90rjibrnbgu6xEbgW+Pd@dont-email.me>

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On Mon, 25 Jan 2016, Rich wrote:

> http://ils.unc.edu/callee/gopherpaper.htm
>
> Quoting from the URL above:
>
>
>   The popular media were soon describing Gopher as an obsolete predecessor
>   to the Web, rather than one of the protocols available along with
>   Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) through most browsers. By juxtaposing
>   today's Web with today's Gopher, it is easy to come to a technologically
>   determinist conclusion about the reason for Gopher's seeming demise.
>   Searching the Web through an engine like Alta Vista using Netscape
>   Communicator 4.5 or Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.0, for example, is
>   much more effective in most cases than trying to conduct the same search
>   in Gopherspace through that same browser or even using a dedicated
>   Gopher client. But the current technological situation was not
>   inevitable. The superiority of the early text-based Web over its
>   Gopherspace contemporary was by no means obvious.
>
McGill University kept using gopher until relatively late, though now I 
can't remember when "late" was. They had classified ads for students and 
faculty, and it used gopher.  I think it was still in place in 2001, when 
I found an ad for a used computer that I bought.  For "a long time" I was 
able to say "but McGill has a gopher" whenever gopher came up, but I can't 
remember when they moved to webpages for this.

Those classified ads seemed to work better with the gopher than as web 
pages, but that may be other factors coming in, like more venues to sell 
things.

   Michael

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