Once upon a time, a text-based Internet navigation system was poised to become the primary way we interact with the net. What happened?
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time for a text of classics episode,
episode, is called what was gopher.
and then originally published on April. Nineteen, two thousand seventeen hope you enjoy an you guys
had been crushing it sitting tons of suggestions. My way- and I just wanna say I really appreciate it so remember:
You have a suggestion for a topic. I should cover. Send me the message: the emails, tech stuff at helstone works dot com, but
this week's listener? Mail episode comes to us from ryan who says,
please do an episode about the gopher protocol, such a different approach to utilizing the internet. That no one knows today, and so
we're gonna, walk back in internet history and learn all about the gopher protocol, but first it kind of Ben
Let us remember what exactly the internet is in
trust me. This is important in the grand scheme of things, but I'll be nice and high level in brief about it. So when you get down to it,
the internet is essentially just a bunch of computing devices that are all connected to each other, and that's it really. Others love infrastructure there that allows us to happen, but ultimately it's a bunch
Computers that are talking to each other is a network.
Of networks using various types of connections and protocols to send and receive communications. But when you just
get down to its simplest of terms, you're, really talking about a bunch of interconnected machines. Now, broadly speaking, we,
in classify most of these machines,
either servers or clients
Now there are other machines as well like rounders and switches and stuff, but I mostly talking about the devices that are directly communicating with each other, rather than the ones that facilitate that communication.
so as a server well does exactly what it sounds like it does. It serves information, clients, request information
So you're smart phone or your computer or your tablet that you use to surf the internet or reedy email or whatever it is. You do online. That is a client. The servers are the machines that contain all the information you are looking at and serve it up to you and the internet
is older than the world wide web alot of people, probably not many today, as were around for like
late nineties, but
people would equate the worldwide web with the internet. Like the tour.
Synonymous and that's not really true.
Web is really just a layer on top of the internet. It's it's an
her face. That makes it easy to access and interact with information
both just one part of the internet and before it came along. People were facing a bit of a challenge
so imagine you ve got this network of net
information is on thousands of servers around the world. You ll
to get access to some specific information like a very particular file. There's one voice,
all that you want to get, but how
The? U tracked down that file
how do you know which computer out there in this vast there
of networks.
How you know, which one actually holds the file you want. You can't just
cream out hey, I need this. One text file you ve gotta, know where it is nor to retrieve it so
The way this would work
Normally. Is that you'd send a message from your computer across the network to the specific
server in question. So ideally
you would know what computer hosts your file
and you would use some method of connecting to that server- maybe you're using tell net maybe you're using ftp.
He filed transfer protocol.
but you're using something to send them
since to that server and in return the server respond to you and then you
request, access to that file,
it's really just that the message you send is just a request for information stored on that server and if you have access
authorize access to information, in other words, if it's not protected by like a password or something that you don't have. The server would send that information back across the internet to you, but
happens, if you don't know which computer holds the
nation you want. How do you
get access to it,.
Back in the old days. This will become like picking up. Tell us
to call somebody, let's say you're trying to call me.
You don't have my phone number. I never gave it to you,
listed anywhere, so how
call me: there are millions of phone numbers out there
If you knew my phone number, everything would be just fine. Could you just dial it directly? But since you don't know my number and theirs
directory to consult your faced with a nearly impossible task, what he do just start randomly hitting buttons until the right person picks up. Well, though,
the problem facing the internet. It arose because the network
came more complicated just as in the old days, you might have very few
votes in a single town, my country,
in the real old days. When telephones first became popular. You don't need to worry about phone numbers. Maybe three people in town had a phone. These days,
you gotta worry about it because millions of people, iphones will same thing, was true. With the network of networks as more computers came on line, is more systems joined the internet? It became more difficult to track very specific stuff down.
so before the internet.
there was a sort of a precursor, not really the intern
before there was an internet, but it was a system of networked computers called arpanet. Now the army
that was a project from the department of defense in the united states,
it was the something that that required, a bunch of computer scientists to sit down and work out protocols.
it was essentially a big but relatively simple network of computers. Now I say simple because if you
but the internet by comparison as a network of networks, it is far
more complex than what arpanet was, but I am not
a thing aspersions on arpanet. It was still incredibly sophisticate
particularly for its time and allow people working on different computers that
used different operating systems, different languages, the ability,
the communicate with each other, and that's phenomenal.
As usually your this. These are like computers, that if you were to connect directly to one another, they would not be able to communicate with each other. They are fundamentally different. So
they designers, the urban at had to figure out a set of rules that all these different types of computers could follow in order to
exchange information with one another so that that required, a lot of work
to create these protocols were sets of rules to facilitate communication, and I've talked about arpanet before
If you want to hear a lot more about it, you can track down the class.
The gap asserted originally published in two thousand and twelve. It was titled, happy fathers of the internet day and then it crystal at night talked a lot about the people who
designed the various protocols that allow internet communication to happen, while any
I too, of the protocols in question during the days of arpanet
worthy transmission control protocol or tcp developed nineteen, seventy five and the internet protocol or ip in nineteen. Seventy eight. These are
almost always grouped together. Whenever anyone talks about internet protocols, they'll, say tcp ip, but that there are technically too
print sets of rules that together end up guy
being the computers
on how to communicate across this network of networks. These are the rules the gave arpanet that ability to create glow
Our communication across various different computers, the two protocols, were officially adopted by arpanet in nineteen. Eighty three,
So while they were developed in the seventies, it wasn't officially adopted until nineteen eighty three. Now they were being
is before that, but it all arpanet was a government thing and just like you would suspect it moves super fast.
because its government, while the following year, nineteen eighty four
the things happen we go.
that really I killer apple mac, commercial? That was like the or what
the nineteen eighty four that was phenomenal, but also son,
I grow systems unveiled a
called the network filing system or enough ass,
that was sort of like a file directory and storage system for network computers running on a heterogeneous, unix environment, so yeah.
There were a bunch of computers running the same unix, and
contain essentially or same version. I guess I should say not: implementation
the same version of unix across all these different machines, and
This kind of, like your basic file management system, you'd, have on a personal computer, so
you ve ever used a computer that had they vary
you should have this like windows. File explorer is a good example. You typically
of a hierarchy of files. You'll have like a top level selection.
Files.
go into one of those he might see. Folders like some
there's. Underneath that mean heading-
Go into that one you'll see more sub folders, maybe some files that kind of stuff
It was essentially that, but it for an entire network of computer. So you can share information between different computers on the system by sea,
giving files to this network, dr something, it's
very familiar to most of us today, but back then was really knew and then
obviously you can retrieve files from the appropriate directory on that same system. Also, a nineteen eighty four
team over at carnegie melon university, released the andrew file system or a f
Now originally the f as provided carnegie, melons students, a campus wide file directory system and later on, a company called trans arc sort of spun off
in turn this into a commercial product,
file systems allows users to access files on other computers, but they all
oh came with a really steep learning curve. If you weren't, particularly computer savvy, it was
challenging to navigate through these vile directories.
Become a like taking some one to a computer and it has all line commands and the person had never really worked with a line command. Interface aid only worked with graphics
I buy command, I mean you have to type in the
command and file names. You want in order to access stuff well, if
that's what you ve been doing the whole time. It's not so bad. You start to pick up on it. Even as new systems are brought on, you can kind of adapt to it pretty quickly because europe,
that basic level of knowledge lovers.
one brand new, two computers. It was real
intimidating. It felt like you need
to have a look
the kind of different commands at your disposal. All the time in a lot of people would have to use cheat sheets and take a look at the
constantly so that they could figure out just how to navigate a computer
It wasn't very user friendly and
really hard to find. What you are looking for, if you didn't already know where to start from the beginning the tree?
with filing systems that you have to understand the organizational strategy
So now you have to understand the language to navigate the system. You also
stand the person who set it up in the first place. So there's there
a bit of machine savvy you have to have, but there's also
How well do I know the person who set up this filing system and how does that person's brain work? Because
maybe they'll set things up in a different way than I would set it up and
if I were to try and navigate using my common sense, I might find it frustrating
So here s an example of what I mean.
back in the day I used to organise all of my dvds by genre and then by alphabetical order by title. So at all.
my action films in one place, I had all my horror movies in another place. All my tim curry movies were together all that kind of thing. You know
I'm curious genre unto himself national treasure, but
You didn't know that I did that
and you didn't know where one section began or ended, you could have tried.
finding a specific title. Maybe you would have had a tough,
you different approach. Maybe you would have organised everything alphabetically from the start, so it didn't matter
what john arose and you would know or a while. The title I'm looking for starts with a d, so I need to find a decent gonna, be there
or maybe you would even have a
crazy organizational strategy. Maybe you would organise everything coronal
quickly by release date, which would convey
everyone, but the gps to film buffs. The point is
these files systems back in the day,
It would be these network drives, they weren't always intuitive. Even if you weren't immediately put off by the interface, you might say
might be able to find what you are looking for now.
Peter still came. Alan m touches archie tool.
He was a university of montreal employee, stupid you. He had gone from one to the other, really when he, when he invented this tool to search for files on the internet. That would be
inferred via ftp file transfer protocol,
instead of requiring the user to know a direct path? You just had to know the name of the file. How was the file named?
still isn't ideal, because I'm sure you have encountered files that had weird or non intuitive names that may have had nothing to do with what the file actually was about
So you had to know precisely how the file is named, or else it really didn't. Do you any good, but at least it didn't require you to also know the full path name of
where a file was, and it allows you to actually do a search across the internet.
Once the web came along and
talk a lot more about the world wide web later on. This episode
once programmers begin building search engines. This problem became less difficult right,
for jobs and start to make things much easier for people the website
made navigation, more intuitive. It made it more accessible to people who work experience with computers or head inside knowledge of directory organization, but in those in between times before the way.
but after the internet came online, that's when gopher emerged,
there were several developers behind gopher really six people into.
it all and the one of the more important ones. I shouldn't even say it that way. One of the leads, I should say cause all six were important. While the leads was mark mckay,
ill and mikhail, attended the universe you minnesota. Actually they were all part of the university minnesota, but
and attended a student earning a bachelors degree chemistry in nineteen? Seventy nine,
But while he earned degree in chemistry, he would actually go on to join the campus microcomputer centre as a programmer and by
the late nineteen eighties, he was leading a team of programmers and together they built an email, client called pop male first.
Mackintosh computer and then later on for the pc platform. The pop in pop male stands for post office protocol
Oh, the way it worked was that you had a server that kind of act like a virtual post office. You would, whenever
rejecting checking email or sending email. It would involve a virtual visit to this post office. You could drop off it
see mail there so
if you want to send a message through your pop mail, client, the client as in your computer,
the workstation, you are using wood relay the message through
the post office server, which would then,
wrecked the message on to your destination when retreat,
messages,
you would actually be going
to this pop mail server to pull the the
males off of it. In order to read them,
though they were the ones who developed this, and it was a very popular type of way of getting hold of email. The next big project,
this team tackled was creating an interface for navigating the universities, local network. So
The question was: how can we find
whatever we're looking for how we organise all this information, we have in a way that makes sense because they can see that the internet was creating the
credible opportunity to share information, but it was getting increasingly difficult to find stuff and organised
properly because
as there are more and more computers coming onto the system and it just made things even
a complicated, so
together of mikhail Bob Albertini, far out ankle, syria, Paul Linder and Daniel tory began.
And to work to develop a solution and, as it turned out, their solution had applications.
far beyond the campus. They worked on. In fact, it would turn out
their solution had applications outside of the cap
They worked on before it actually beep was implemented by the
campus itself. If it would work across the internet in general,
now I'm gonna jump into what they did in just a second, but before I do that, let's take a quick break to vague our sponsor.
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terms and conditions apply. So the team got to work in ninety ninety one. They knew that they wanted a system that could organise information in an intuitive way, giving users and opportunity to navigate the information they needed quickly. They wanted to be a climate
servers system. This was really important to them. What they pay.
The biggest decision they made. The though
important. One to them was too not go
a centralized, mainframe org,
social strategy. They want to get away from mainframe computers. They saw that the future was in desktops, but desktop
eames, especially in ninety one, were
slow. They had relatively limited capabilities, so
whatever system they created had to be optimized
For these less powerful machines
they also want to make this system scalable with options. Have various departments register servers with a top level server, so in other words, you could have different departments having their own network
but have them linked to the main network
Did you get navigate throughout all of these different systems? And now
If you connect to that top level server you could
I have a to any lower department through a master menu.
they also won in the tool to be efficient and light weight, meaning they didn't want to tax those normal pcs and workstations. They did
wanna tool that would move at a snail's pace and that
was one of the reasons the day really focused on text based
communications because its doesnt work,
a whole lot of data to send text and it meant that it could be
relatively fast and informative,
They also decide that the server would not retain states
Now. That means that the server wouldn't need to keep a record of all the different information request for multiple clients. Once a connection closed, the state was white and
we're closed the connection after every transaction essentially
So, together they worked on this tool and
a decided to call it gopher,
the name by the way serves many purposes for one. The mass god of the university of minnesota is the golden gopher minnesota. Is the gophers state also the
The idea of a metaphorical gopher appealed to them gophers tunnel and
in a way the gopher protocol, Canada.
animals through networks
They also started to refer to the networks that were using gopher as gopher space and fine.
The gophers also the term for someone who runs Aaron's and fetches things, because the gopher we'll go fur like coffee or you can go for snacks, that kind of stuff the classic muppet show series had scooter. Who was a gopher.
There are a lot of jokes about that about how scooter was a gopher by job, but he wasn't a gopher by critter like he was not the actual animal gopher anyway. Here's the weird things
oh, the team knew they were on the something when they designed gopher, but it
get allow traction rail, the gate, despite its utility, because the universe in minnesota
didn't see how this would be useful. They didn't see the value in it, so they
really put any support behind it. They didn't emblem
not at all. So the team decide to sidestep all that red tape
one of the team members uploaded this
where to an ftp server
and posted a message on an internet mailing list, saying hey guys. We develop this kind of cool tool. We think it is
way, to organise information on networks and allow people to find stuff give it a try
So people began to download it and put to use
and not long after that it sir
take off.
places were using it nay decided that it,
a whole lot of sense and eventually the university of Minnesota administration, relented and implemented gopher as well on their canvas.
Well, it's gonna talk about governed.
Limitations and what it was actually like. So there were
Two main ways you could interact with over. One of them was to install software on your computer, and this is looking at
Interacting with gopher as a user, as opposed to as an administrator
so you want to use over, will want
you could do is install software on your computer, and this was a client side. Gopher application
which really is not that different from a web browser like firefox or chrome or safari.
Free. It's essentially a similar thing. It's it's a program that runs on your computer that acts as the interface for this protocol. Those
for all client site applications, just like the gopher one was, but you didn't
have to do that. What you could do, instead is use a tell net application
No, that was another old protocol that still used in some places.
That would allow you to
virtually law again to another terminal and
just had to have the correct address import number and everything in order to tell net into that that room
So you could you tell me to log onto a remote server and use these servers side, gopher, client to access directories and, in that case, all the work
being done by the server, and you don't have to act
However, a client base the application on your side,
the style of the dover client, really depended upon its implementation. The team wanted to make sure that it was that it was customizable at those always simple, as always text based
It could be extremely simple where all
our text options under a menu org.
it have some very primitive kind of graphic.
During her face elements in it. Graphic user interface, also known as gooey but lead,
less. What's the right word lesser in my impressive or
extensive as what you advised in the worldwide web later.
and there were two worlds and the gopher verse the world the client could see and the world the server worked with so
the server side.
Every item within it
Gopher directory would have certain elements to it and that include
the client, visible name, a selective,
which was usually something that use the path name thought that would connect.
the server for location purposes, then there would be a host name which would tell the top level server which
peter actually contain the file in question and an ip port number ports are gonna like telephone.
I saw a computer had to know which port it should use. When contacting other computers.
The client side on the user side only those
I invisible names would show up. Everything else would be hidden.
And to use an analogy. Imagine that you go to a party
and its whether super hip geeky tech parties that I assume happen, but I never get invited to.
anyway, everyone gets a little name tag and the name tag just has the person's name on it. That's it that's the only of her.
about the person that is visible to the average attendee. So
when you walk around the party, you can see each person's name, but that's it but
Let's say you're a super duper awesome vip at this party and all
super duper. Awesome vips at this particular party get all swag bag. The has a pair of smart glasses in them and if you put
the smart glasses on.
You see projected above the name tag of each person, more information, and it tells you wear that person lives
what their phone number is. Tells you about their favorite lunch,
spots. In other words, you
a few different ways. You could reach those people if you needed to.
On the governors.
that sort of same approach was applying, but only two files not to people
wasn't nathan creepy going on but mikhail, and his group decided that users didn't need to see all the extra information they don't need to know where
a file is on a network. They don't care, they don't. Care
If the file they want is on computer, a or computer, be they just want access to that file, so they d
that all that access information would be
invisible to the user. It would still be there for the servers, because the servers would need to know where.
breathing was nor to direct users to the right location, but to the EU.
There's themselves, they don't care, so get rid of it and ended up
in a much more elegant system that way,
So, let's say you ve logged into a college campuses, gopher server,
The tool was originally developer colleges. So what would
to actually see, if you did this well
you'd start off with a menu of options, it's kind of like a table of contents and that would allow you to explore different areas of the gopher verse more thoroughly. A typical
top level menu, might include by the way I'm taking this
largely from a request for comments that mikhail and his group created in order to
discuss. What gopher is what it was meant for and how it works, the fur
It might be something like about internet gopher and they will
really just be that little phrase. And if you select
but that one it would open up something that would
Are you to learn more about internet gopher? I would pull
the files that could tell you about the version that govern use and how best to navigate it
even tell you about these site administrator and
fact, and that original request for comments. They suggested that every admin
strader for it
gopher server include.
Or her name, email address and phone number so that you
could get in contact with them. Should something go wrong: yikes
Obviously this was in the days when very few people, comparatively speaking,
we're using an internet tool, because you can just imagine how much you know traffic you would get
from various emails and phone numbers. If you just put your actual address out on a major website that would be tough, the next element,
on this gopher less might be something like around the campus and that could include
or directories that give you links to files about various areas of campus. You might get some men use of different options, for example
at university of georgia. If I,
around the campus on a gopher site, and I clicked on that. It might take me to a couple different, some menus, one for north campus and one for self camp
us, because the universe you georgia, at least at the time when I was attending it, was roughly divided into north and south campuses.
Another option might say, courses, schedules and calendars, which would
obviously take you to information about the classes offered by that college and when they happen, as well as the list of campus events throughout the year and so on and so forth. Those are just the kind of basic
will content stuff. You would see in again it's all text based typically
the options on any list. We have indicators to let you know if you are looking at the name of a file or if you will
king, at the name of another directory so again
an example given from that are sea paper that was written back and nineteen ninety three. They the group showed
directories is being followed by an ellipse seas and files were not so if it's
campus schedule with no ellipses. Then you knew that
clicking on that, would give you a file with the schedule on it if you chose that option, but if it
if you were looking at other illicit said, college activities, dot dot died, you knew that
he died. The dog that ellipses indicate
that it was a link to another directory. So
clicked on college activities. You would get another menu
would subdivide up. College activities may be it with these sports after school activities. It might be
extracurricular student groups, that kind of thing
gophers design
wows other servers to interact with a top level server, so it didn't have to just be a single computer running all of this information. In fact that was beside the point. The the whole purpose of this was to
while multiple servers to connect with each other and create an end,
overall strategy for navigation to allow students or other
users to learn more information
but you could have saved the computer science department. Server register
under a top level option for the entire university and
english department could have its own server and the math department can have its own server and so on, and so on. So each
Our mental server would further point down the chain to specific files relevant to that department and
four also included the ability to stack, meaning
You could actually retrace our steps which has come
like hitting the back bar or the back button rather on a browser,
if you went down one path and then decided hey, I need to see something else that was further back in my browsing. You could back up the pathway until you got to that specific fork and then take the other
work and that was actually pretty innovative in the early nineties, it wasn't like it was. You know something that they were copying from. Other people,
Unlike today's websites, the information on gopher pages tended to remain fairly static.
Which actually was also a huge help for gopher space. You didn't have to update things quite so frequently,
occasionally, you might need to update a file or you might need to add a file to a server, but that didn't happen at the.
Quincy. We see today on the web. There weren't allowed dynamic pages out there, it
important for gopher to be able to adapt to changes and evolving condition, so the team designers,
this that it would allow them to
update files and path, names in pieces, surgeon
you have to do a full of data. The whole system regularly. You could just focus on which ever sections had new information and just update those bits ever
remained the same that sped everything else will
like, if you are only making changes to two percent of your network,
then there's no reason to update all one hundred percent. They could save time, but just obtained at two percent
They also made another very
clever choice. They recommended that all top level servers have a clone,
away if one server were to fail for whatever reason another one could take over the job. Also,
If you had a really busy network, you can have both servers acting at the same time sharing the load. So some users are using server. A some users are using server be, but both of them are identical. They have complete
negation of tools to go through the whole network and
so it doesn't really matter which one you land on as a user, it's gonna be the same experience and since most
remain static,
really have to worry about the two.
Global servers getting out of sync. They would be pretty much ready to go all the time I mean. Occasionally, you'd have to update at least parts of the system, but
it was pretty manageable, especially in those early days before things got super complicated,
another team also suggested that all registered servers in a system have an alias that the gopher client could use to locate those servers, and this
The client would know each registered server by its alias, rather than the servers primary name
which was more or less unchangeable.
Now, why would you want to have an alias while the reason was to improve portability?
oh if, as an administrator you'd do so.
that you needed to move files from one server to another server,
That could be a huge headache because it would mean having to update all these different path names so that your top level machine,
knows where everything is now right
If you had to say, oh well
instead of being on this machine. It needs to be on this machine. I've gotta update all these different files,
these different path names so that people now,
getting the system will get to where they need to go
I think the alias was actually a very
right here to get around this clients wooden require an update or any alteration. They don't need to know that
peter one which used to be known as bob has gone off line
nl computer to has all of computer once stuff.
Said the administrator would just name computer to Bob. They would give computer to the alias.
of the old computer one and then
clients would just end up going to computer too, because
looking at one or two there just looking for bob, and it could be.
To his bob. Now, that's where they go. It was an elegant solution, particularly
once to have got really complex. Now the brilliant thing behind go
is that the end user didn't need to know any of this.
it didn't matter to them. They
just needed to have a simple interface to interact with the
did to be able to see the choices they wanted to make a choice and follow that pathway.
Was very similar to cover a choose your own adventure book as law
As the directories were clear and organization of the information made sense, it was easy to use and then there,
as the killer app the abyss
but he d search
so to search on gopher, you have to set up
an actual go, go search server, it would be its own.
If this was too
essentially have all the different files that are connected to that point
miller, gopher, space, indexed
The servers could perform full text, searches and all the files on all the registered servers in that gopher space, so by default search.
Where is assumed that if you were to type in multiple words, the space
between those words were and and in bullion logic. In other words, if you typed in spanish dance in the queen
be field so just have spanish space dance. The search
but actually assume what you are saying is give me
all the files that have both the word,
spanish and dance in them, files that didn't
did that criteria would not be returned. So if
It was a file that had the word spanish in it, but dance never appeared in that file. You wouldn't get same thing if it were
ants, but spanish was never there. You would get it
structure, only worked with servers that were registered to the same system, so these go.
Her spaces weaken like islands in the ocean, you can connect,
gopher spaces together, you could end up
registering the servers of different gopher spaces of that they made a larger networks
and that would allow you.
To navigate from one system of servers to another, but that
the necessarily the aim of gopher. So if I did a search on a gopher space for a specific terms,
again at you, J
ujiji was its own contained system, its own net,
work of servers throughout the campus, but none of those had connections to other campuses. I'm not gonna find
files that are stored at the university of minnesota, because the
who systems are distinct, I'll only five,
files that are on eugenie system
oh, it was a little different from the world wide web. It had these again these kind of islands of information
well, I've got some more talk about, including the right
isn't fall of gopher itself the before I get into that section. Let's take another quick break to thank our sponsor.
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Target we're talking about the ninety nine these now the internet was still pretty darn young back then, especially,
an internet that was accessible to people beyond the computer science field,
No one was really sure what it would evolve into in those early nineties in ninety.
I need to the internet engineering task force, or I e t of held a meeting in san diego and they,
I m a cable and also ankles area to come out and to speak to the group as a whole about the work they were doing with gopher. Now the.
giving included a whole bunch of different important figures and internet history, including
tim berners Lee, who is that
are you pioneered the world wide web? He built the first web page at CERN. That's the same organisation that runs the large hadron collider
A berners lee was there to talk about his approach to internet navigation, using what he called the web and hyper text
which I am sure you are familiar with, because that's what everybody uses today.
He also was very interested in trying to find a way for the web and gopher to work together.
The folks over it gopher, they were looking at bursley approach to navigation and they said this doesn't make any sense using hypertext of different words too, to leap to connected, but
stink ideas, that's that
it's an organization impossible. It's like the opposite of what we're doing we're trying to create.
I keys of information and the web
is a web, it's all the same,
connectivity, so they never really got to work. Things out would berners lee something that they said.
In retrospect perhaps was a mistake.
But he didn't know that at the time no one was sure at the time whose approach was going to work out best. So
It wasn't the as a weird experience right and besides the web, programmers learned about other means of accessing a navigating the internet,
There are other ones like prosperity and waste
w view I s so be clever. Norman was the
pioneer behind Prospero, which was meant to
the personalized directories of the internet in response to user queries, as I could organize information and allow users to search grouping resources together, so that users didn't have to go down several different individual paths and just hope for the best ways.
good for wide area, information server. It was
text searching system that could look for specific action
things are taxed on files on a server
retrieving any hits that it might find.
and so it was also very different from the gopher approach or the prosperity
she was a pretty basic strategy to certain retrieval
So at this gathering mikhail discovered that people already knew a lot about over. He thought it was
going out there to tell people about a system that he had developed and can launch the year before. But everyone bears
to really be familiar with it.
allow them were running their own gopher servers. There
really curious to hear more about the team behind gopher this up.
red spread rapidly because of its easy implementation and interface and adoption was incredible,
by nineteen. Ninety three gophers traffic growth rate hit
hundred ninety seven percent
Well, that sounds astronomical, but keep in mind. Percentages are tricky for
If I sold one newspaper in a week and then
Following week, I sold ten newspapers. I have
growth, sales rate of nine hundred percent, so
while minor. Ninety seven percent growth is is spectacular, we're not talking about enormous numbers by,
mighty. Ninety four, the number of gopher servers, or at least the ones that the team was aware of her
just under seven thousand servers.
At dover, did have a big head start on the web. It took the web a bit longer
to catch on, because you had to have the development of the clients that people could
used to browse the web and yo yo
the development of the actual solve
where people are using to create web servers.
gopher was popular enough for the team to start to hold conferences of their own called gopher cons they even
He didn t, shirts and merchandise, with a gopher logo on it. Colleges and companies
adopting it. Even the white house launched a gopher site back in those days, but
Hot on the heels of gopher was the world wide web concept, which had its own compelling methods of navigating and preserve presenting information, even though it seemed non intuitive to the gopher group.
Now the people really like it, anyone
spent a lot of time on a site like wikipedia dancing from one topic to another, just diving down those rabbit holes. They know what I'm talking about.
Someone, ironically, I would say TIM berners Lee actually was able to spread the word about the worldwide web using a gopher site as helping
were able to get the files they needed to create web servers and web clients as walls fine
information about the web itself.
And the governing was running into problems with the university of minnesota as well. The administration was always something other reluctant partner with this group
at first, the college had been a roadblock,
you remember, I mentioned they refused to implement gopher in those early days. They only did it
sure it had already been implemented at other college campuses members
the dover development team were looking at the possibility of creating a private entity like a spin off company to create gopher as a commercial product.
but back in those days the internet was still largely the domain of universities and government offices. In fact, alot of people looked at the possibility of private enterprise getting involved with the internet as something they did not want a lot of people kind of compared it too.
Public broadcasting. They said
That should remain like pbs
and all these companies- that's like add, supported tv. We don't want that here. So there was a lot of resistance, even among the groups themselves. Not everybody was in agreement that they should go the privatized around and
but the dot com era had not yet begun at this point,
Then the university of Minnesota instituted a licensing policy for gopher they
any organization out there there was operating for profit would need to pay a licence. Fees
to the university of minnesota in order to use gopher and the cost,
of this licence fee was sliding it depended upon the size and type of business in question.
And the university was looking to keep all that money for themselves really. Meanwhile, the development team found that the university still one of them to do their regular desk jobs as programmers for the university of minnesota, so they were supposed to
both developed, gopher and work on their normal jobs and they weren't really given any more resources to do this. It was still just the six of them
so their morale began to decline, and
and they had the university expecting them. Do these two jobs at once
as well as having an entire population of users out there who are angry,
about this licensing policy that the university has had put in place and and the team was kind of caught in the middle
one point: the university even considered outsourcing gopher to other programmers, essentially taking it away from the team that
created it and giving it to someone else may
while the web was just getting started, remember that I said gopher grew by nine hundred ninety seven percent back and ninety. Ninety three.
while the web also grew that year by three
grid forty one thousand six hundred and thirty four percent. As also
the first year of the commercial web browser mosaic mosaic prove that you could go commercial?
on the internet. So, while the gopher group was reluctant the website
Things were going in a very different direction:
and the web was incorporating stuff. The gopher couldn't really support. Like images on web pages, not first, and
agenda. Web page was not a huge asset because it took for ever to render a picture on a screen, and it caused some people to say that,
w, w w actually stood for worldwide weight but
speeds were on the rise as well. That helped reduce some of that loading time and
the gopher team, rather sorry
likely said we knew
the game was up when we realise that people could get naked photos on their comes
there screens using the worldwide web, something that you could not be done with gopher and they were.
Being pretty serious about it at the time by the spring.
ninety. Ninety four web traffic exceeded gopher traffic,
So, even though gopher had a head start, web had caught up and past gopher traffic
Companies were discovering that there were some possibilities on the web
Oh really, web commerce was still a couple years away from really taking off
it offered opportunities beyond just sharing information, which was really the only.
Gopher was good for was really sharing information and distributing files. It wasn't meant
you really more than that, so the web had
versatility on its side as well, and one of the big things that helped drive the night.
home and gopher had nothing to do with how people use the internet
it had to do with a scandal unrelated to any one on the gopher team,
John nigerian, a transplant, surgeon
diversity of minnesota,
was accused of fraud, tax evasion and embezzlement. The charges
led the national institutes of health, which is a federal government office here in the united states, to withdraw funding to the university, and that was a serious blow to the schools. They went to emergency mode to try and fix the situation
they as part of that as the gopher team to
We a new system to track accounts and file paperwork, but
as a large part of this action.
They should really be dealt with
A paper work was failing to be filed on time,
so the team eventually developed a web based transaction programme.
also kind of ironic when you think about that was a web based approach. It was the world's first web based transaction programme
It also meant that, while they were developing this, they could not continue working on gopher because they just it
have the time to do it so by the time they finished the web based application goes
was dead in the water or I guess.
and under the ground? I suppose if we want to stick with the metaphor, any
It's it's not really dead dead, it's untidily got, there are still gopher servers out. There
if you know where to look but
no evolving entity. Gopher was essentially a thing of the past and it so
point had no one's really sure. When someone took the original gopher server known as mother gopher offline, the
Firstly, the minnesota supported it for several years after gopher clearly lost the raced the web, but there is no longer the case,
as for mikhail, he would go on to join duke university, where I still works today and others
because of the team have gone on to do other things, some of them retired some old women's working for Google, one of the state of the university of minnesota.
oh and the doktor nigerian. Who was it
used of those crimes, was ultimately exonerated of those accusations of fraud and embezzlement. The jury returned with a verdict of not guilty, but by then
the damage was done in more ways than one gopher. It faded away due to lack of support and the unit-
Steve found itself struggling to regain the trust of the nih, and that was the text.
classics episode what was gopher, which originally published April nineteen two thousand. Seventy
I hope you enjoy that episode for the older listeners out there. Let me know if you used gopher.
I some of the younger ones may have to its is less likely, I think,
but I got, let me know, views over and you and your thoughts on it. I would love to hear from you
and I hope
we're all well and then we'll talk to you again release it,
stop
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Transcript generated on 2023-12-12.