Net Neutrality gave us the Web and saved us from gopher

At Wednesday's Parliamentary roundtable on filtering and the Web, Robert Topolski of the Open Technology Initiative used a parable about the Web's birth to explain how the current generation of copyright, porn, terrorism (etc) filters equip network operators with the tools to murder the future-Web in its cradle:

Computing power has been rapidly increasing since the mid 1960s, as predicted by physicist Gordon Moore working in Silicon Valley at the time. By the 1990s, there was just about enough power to allow access to text and image-based files via the internet, and Tim Berners-Lee's World Wide Web was born.

But network administrators at the time preferred a streamlined text-only internet service, says Topolski, using something called the Gopher protocol.

He suggested that if those administrators had had access to data filtering technology, like that becoming popular with companies and governments today, they would have used it to exclude Berners-Lee's invention, and kill off the World Wide Web.

How Moore's Law saved us from the Gopher web (via Futurismic)

(Image: Gopher: screenshots)

• [tmdpny]

  I miss gopher – and my archie and veronica searches…

• [mdh]

  Al Gore killed gophers? What a country.

• [dainel]

  The biggest difference between gopher and html is that in html, links are embedded within the text of the web page. In gopher, the content pages cannot contain links. The menus in gopher are like directories in a file system. Directories can contain files or more directories, but files cannot contain directories in them. At least, that’s what I think it was. I didn’t get to use gopher much before the www all but killed it.

• [nonplus]

  Huh? What a bizarre claim. Is he saying that network admins weren’t capable of blocking port 80 when HTTP was getting off its feet?!?

  Gopher was the VHS to HTTP’s DVD. It’s a simple, lightweight protocol whose capabilities was just right for its time (terminal clients) and, as with video tapes, its time has passed. You should think of it as user-friendly anonymous FTP with some basic (directory-level) hyper-linking. BTW, Gopher does support images and other binary formats.

  It’s not really the protocol (HTTP) that made the web successful but rather the preferred document format (HTML) that allowed for richer content and thus for the web’s success.

• [octopussoup]

  I remember Veronica. That was near the end of the gopher days.

• [IsolatedGestalt]

  Wha? Even ignoring the fact that network admins at the time _did_ have the tools to block/filter this kind of traffic, this would still have little or nothing to do with endpoint computing power. If the claim is that network admins “preferred a streamlined text-only internet service”, then it’s a bandwidth problem, not a processing problem.

• [Waldo Jaquith]

  As one of those network administrators who preferred Gopher—and boycotted the WWW as a matter of bandwidth principle until 1994—I’ve got a pretty good recollection of this. Nonplus is right for saying that it was HTML that made the difference, not HTTP, and IsolatedGestalt is right for saying that port filtering isn’t exactly newfangled technology.

  The only bit of this that is accurate is that technology was just developed enough to make the WWW a viable alternative to Gopher come 1993. Windows 3.1 was widespread, and X Windows was more and more common on *nix. My home computer didn’t support a GUI (an 8086 that could just barely run Windows 3.1, but it wasn’t worth the hard drive space), but one computer lab at the local university had been upgraded from DOS-based systems to shiny new Gateway 2000s with 17″ monitors (!). Seeing the WWW rendered in a GUI, rather than in a text-based browser, allowed me to see some significant benefits of the WWW (versus Gopher). I suspect that a lot of folks had similar experiences. But that’s not a coincidence—that’s surely part of why TBL developed the WWW as a graphical system. Why bother if nobody has a GUI?

• [paulehoffman]

  Oh, man. This is defintely junk. I’m there with Waldo (including being “one of those network administrators who preferred Gopher”) and at one point had a business running both Gopher and HTTP. The preference for HTTP had *nothing* to do with the inability to filter; HTML just beat the crap out of Gopher menus for usability. Some of us even tried to bridge the two in creative ways (there was a very heated discussion about this at the Gopher conference in 1993 or 1994), and we realized that we should just go with “real” HTML.

  Revisionist history in the name of greater freedom is still a lie.