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the welcome to tech stuff, a production from I heart, radio, the hey there and welcome to tech stuff. I'm your host Jonathan Strickland, I'm an executive producer with iheart radio and how the tech arya 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. hey podcast listeners returning for season, for is the restless ones and original podcast presented by t mobile for business, and I heart radio, join me as I sit down for in depth. Discussions with the people at the intersection of technology and business. Learn of their unique missions and challenges to enhance, optimization and drive their organizations forward. We

veal. How today's forward thinking leaders continue to thrive and a world of ever changing technology. You'll hear from those on the leading edge of business, share, industry, expertise and how a strong, inflexible network lays the foundation for positive changes in their fields. From revolutions and customer experience and employee enable meant to it is with the power to change the game and even the world. They are building a bridge to what's next and adopt transformative technologies like five g to create a more connected and meaningful future today check out new episodes of the restless ones availing and I heard radioactive apple podcast, wherever you listened to podcasts paper boys, laying down the street chucking newspapers, male carrier stuffing mailboxes the internet. The way we get our news is always changing, but no matter how its delivered the economist has remained the global trusted source for one hundred. Eighty years and now with the economists new,

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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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you can enjoy. Banking, with better rates and bigger rewards, comes What kind of rewards awaits you live? first tech fed dotcom, slash, checking first tech, investing in you, insured by and see you. Membership is required and subject to approval for stack, rewards I can get. Why is four percent annual percentage yield and the first fifteen thousand dollars with qualifying transactions and e statements in point? One percent of remaining balance non qualified a p. What is point zero? One percent on all balances. 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 I heart radio production or more podcast from my heart radio visit the iheart radio, an apple pie wherever you listen to your favorite jobs,. The way we get our news changes, but for one one hundred eighty years, the economist has remained the global trusted source and

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