The NCSA and Cern web servers had the ability to let users on a system publish content from a specially named "~/public_html" directory. At UIUC, the engineering labs quietly enabled this functionality for all engineering students.<p>Within a week, dozens of students had their own web pages up, and by the end of the year, hundreds did. Encouraged by their initial success, this encouraged students to stand up their own web servers so they could run cgi scripts, etc.<p>As far as I knew, there was no equivalent taste-test for providers of Gopher content. You either stood up your own server or got special access to someone else's server, both of which were hard to do at the time.
The primary gopher killer was around February 1993 the University of Minnesota announced that it would charge licensing fees for the use of its implementation of the Gopher server. In contrast, CERN said anyone could implement the WWW. Practically all implementation work from then on used the WWW. In addition, the gopher developers wouldn't work (basically) with open standards groups like the IETF.<p>By trying to control & license everything, they lost everything.
There is a sort of Gopher "successor" in the works called Gemini that was featured recently:<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23042424" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23042424</a><p>It aims to fix flaws in the Gopher protocol while still making it easy to implement clients.<p>If you haven't dug into Gopher, there's lots of cool stuff in it from ASCII art and old computer manuals to games and lots of blogs (called "phlogs"). I suggest grabbing a client and heading to the Gopher Lawn to get a taste:<p>gopher://bitreich.org/1/lawn<p>(Lynx works as a client, but there are a ton more out there with fun UIs.)
One thing I never see in these analyses is ease of setting up a server. Back when I was in college and got my first computer, I could install a simple web server, drop any file in its folder, and view that file in my web browser. If it was HTML, and I got the HTML wrong, it would still display most of the page.<p>Gopher wasn't like that at all. I downloaded the Gopher server and ran it. Then I put a file in its folder, and it didn't show up. You had to (IIRC) write a special index file to tell it how to serve each file. If you didn't get it perfectly right, it wouldn't show up at all. And of course the error messages and documentation were somewhere between "terrible" and "missing".<p>I wanted Gopher to succeed, because I liked the simple, regular organization of information, rather than the crazy anything-goes world of the World Wide Web. I just couldn't figure out how to get it to work.
I still maintain a gopher presence[1] as a mirror. Once it was determined that gopher could neither be monetized nor weaponized, it was doomed to obscurity. It is an open academic tool for open academic purposes. As an aside, I actually saw the initial announcement on USENET about CERN releasing something called a browser for something else they called the World Wide Web. I couldn't see the point since we already had gopher, veronica, jughead, et al. Absolutely prescient on my part...<p>[1]<a href="https://gopher.commons.host/gopher://gopher.club/1/users/every/" rel="nofollow">https://gopher.commons.host/gopher://gopher.club/1/users/eve...</a>
There <i>are</i> still some gopher holes. For instance, the bitreich is quite active:<p><pre><code> gopher://bitreich.org
</code></pre>
Some of the content is rather funny, other is a bit too much for insiders to be comprehensible. It seems to be a "pure" fork of the suckless.org community.
I used Gopher to download MPEG-1 videos back in 1993.
Whole two of them.
One was egg shot by a bullet and second one was Michael Jackson's Smooth criminal anti-gravity lean clip.
Exciting times.
I was in college getting my MIS degree a little before this article was written, and gopher was already being described is antiquated and vintage technology.<p>The web had a much broader appeal to me and as soon as I could I set up a page on our schools web server. I then took a deep dive into CGI scripting and that got me to start coding.
I remember the first time I read about the web was on gopher.<p>A few years later (1997), part of my job was to migrate a bunch of university gopher holes to the web.
I just built a rough gopher server for createaforum.com just for fun <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nws5oVpPY_g" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nws5oVpPY_g</a>