Bob Alberti on March 14, 2009 3:06 PM 

Gopher was doomed indirectly by Moore's Law, but what killed Gopher was LICENSING.

While processor speed was doubling, MODEM speed was not increasing as rapidly. In fact, acoustic 
modem speed in commercial devices has since peaked and is not perceptibly increasing.

Gopher existed during a brief period when the modem speeds were climbing from 2400 baud to 19,200. 
At these speeds, even small image transfers (then GIF and the earliest JPGs) took several seconds. The 
average Gopher page, at about 1,500 bytes, could load "instantly" at 2400 baud. The average web page, 
at 15,000 bytes, took several seconds at 2400 baud.

Even at 19,200, large (150K) images took several seconds to load. This delay, while tolerable, 
discouraged web pages that auto-loaded more than one or two images.

Only when modem speeds increased to 56K did a page loaded with a modest amount of graphics 
download at an acceptable pace.

Gopher was designed as a campus-wide information system, and only became an Internet phenomenon 
when University of Minnesota politics drove its development onto the Internet. After three years of 
design, the U of MN CWIS committee had a foot-thick set of requirements and specifications, with out 
one page of code. Exasperated with this process, Mark McCahill, Paul Lindner, and Farhad Anklesaria 
produced a working CWIS prototype, Gopher, between the April and May meetings of the CWIS 
committee, and demonstrated it at the next meeting. The committee, predictably, had a conniption and 
further development of Gopher was prohibited. Mark put Gopher up on an FTP site and colleagues at 
other institutions were invited to continue development, and it took off from there. So Gopher was 
never intended as a world-wide Internet protocol.

While Gopher was effective at presenting the Internet as a file structure, the Web was always going to 
be more popular since it presents the Internet like a magazine. The limiting factor was the bandwidth 
necessary to communicate the images (and other media).

But what killed Gopher was licensing. Just as Gopher was never designed as anything more than a 
campus-wide information system to help students and faculty connect with campus resources or 
register for class, so was Gopher programming never intended to become the full-time occupation of 
the developers. All of us had numerous other responsibilities, not the least of which was walk-in and 
telephone computer consulting for the 100,000-person U of Mn campuses. While the U of Mn was quite 
happy to accept the praise and publicity that came from Internet Gopher, no funds were ever actually 
directed to the project.

In an effort to make it possible for Gopher to be supported full time, a radical new idea was floated. 
What if we LICENSED the SOFTWARE? For... MONEY?

If this seems conventional to you, now, it certainly was not, then. Back in 1993, most Internet domain 
names ended in .edu or .mil. A TLD of ".com" was considered crass and improper, I kid you not.

The ruling philosophy was "The Internet is a public medium build by colleges and the military for the use 
of the public, and using it for profit is crass commercialism." I know, a lot has changed, eh?

So when the Gopher team suggested that institutions PAY for the privilege of using Gopher, Gopher 
servers vanished overnight. Just the suggestion that money be involved offended some system 
administrators sensibilites enough to make them drop it; others feared that lawsuits were imminent.

Meanwhile, at just that time, modem speeds increased to 56K, and a brand new FREE, unlicensed server 
called a WEB server was arriving on the scene. And of course it could show pretty pictures etc. etc. 
Without funds to allocate the Gopher team's resources full-time, our other duties took us away from 
Gopher support just as the Web was taking off. The spotlight moved on from Gopher, for multiple 
reasons, but it moved because of money.

The one place where Gopher SHOULD have been revived, but was not, was on cell phones. For a few 
years around the turn of the century, cell phone communications were bottlenecked by low 
bandwidths, just as modem speeds had been a decade earlier. This was a perfect opportunity for a text-based 
interface like Gopher.

Instead what happened was that HTML was stripped down to its barest of bare-bones, and an clumsy, 
inadequate cell phone interface achieved. Many of us can recall how unpleasant those browsers were. 
An opportunity for using Gopher was missed.

Gopher was a protocol that bridged the gap in modem speeds between 2400 and 56000 baud. But it did 
provide many people with an early leg up into the Internet. And the Web might have been hampered by a few 
years had not Gopher servers been there to provide the earliest search engines and Internet infrastructure 
to allow for the development, distribution, and discussion of the software for the World Wide Web.

I suspect a lot of people downloaded their first web browser and server software off of Gopher links to 
FTP servers.

--
Bob Alberti, CISSP, Internet Gopher, RFC 1436. Writer of early MUD, Scepter of Goth, 1983.