[ih] "How Gopher Nearly Won the Internet" Re: The Rise and Fall of the Gopher Protocol

[johnl at iecc.com (John Levine)]

>?Provocative quote in big letters:  ?If it weren't for Gopher, the web
>probably would have died.? ?

Nice try.

Gopher was pretty cool for the early 1990s, but even if it hadn't had
a self-inflicted fatal wound when U of Minn wanted license fees, the
web would have won anyway.

When I wrote Internet for Dummies in 1993, I had roughly equal sized
chapters on Gopher, WWW, and WAIS.  At the time I thought WAIS was the
future, because full text search was so powerful.

I was right about search being powerful (see Google) but what I didn't
realize was that the web was general enough that it would absorb the
links from Gopher, the search from WAIS, the software archives from
FTP, and everything else.

R's,
John