> At GopherCon 1993, it was announced that Gopher servers would need to pay for the privilege of using the protocol... Well, that didn’t work out. People were angry and many felt betrayed. They weren’t quiet about any of it either.
> If one were to attempt to identify a single failure of Gopher in competition with the web, it would be the licensing costs. No such fee existed for the World Wide Web.
This, a thousand times. I watched as this happened. The instant that announcement was made, gopher was finished. Gopher might have lost later as HTML kept adding features, but by the time those features were added to HTML, gopher had already lost.
Similarly, Bertrand Meyer killed Eiffel by trying to charge money for the compiler, and missing the nascent OSS movement. Java was an inferior language in a few important ways but the compiler and runtime were free. He could not compete with both C++ and Java.
A number of people in that era thought this was a fad and that business as usual would prevail.
The licensing fee wasn't the sole reason, but it certainly sounded the death knell for Gopher and gave users reasons to look elsewhere.
For all the gauzy what-could-have-been speculations about Gopher, it really was more like a hierarchical wiki. WWW's freestyle document model quickly expanded to an application platform that could support all manner and style of services. Fees or not, Gopher didn't have a chance.
It seems to me that Gopher just failed to keep up with the times. Embedding images into the page was a killer feature for HTML and Gopher was still doggedly text based because they were still supporting the VT100 users that had been the core userbase. Plus the web went on to support text formatting, tables, and even eventually layout.
The article isn't entirely correct about the early web being completely free. Netscape was not free software, at least on paper. In practice they didn't try to stop people from spreading it far and wide and I think the sales were somewhat modest despite being the core element of a technological revolution. Also, I guess NCSA Mosiac was technically around, but it lacked enough features to make it a second class citizen compared to Netscape Navigator.
Gopher was built for a pre-HAL world, where you couldn't just assume that every user had a graphics card that your software supported - hell, a lot of them might not have graphics at all. In that environment, lack of embedded multimedia was a selling point due to interoperability. If you had a computer and a phone line, you could access Gopher's primeval web. Graphics and sound be damned.
For what it's worth, I have a copy of Netscape on a CD-ROM that came with a copy of PC/Computing sometime around 1994-1995. For those magazine subscribers, it was "free" if you squint a little.
There were ways around that, though I never found the experience to be worth the hassle. The Internet Adapter [1] was the one my shell account supported back in the mid-90s.
Gopher was a much more highly structured format. Even if they'd included inline images, they didn't really have a day 0 formatting or layout language that allowed for nesting. There were other locked in choices too, like using a 8 bit value for file type.
If the idea of a text first structured hyper text protocol interests you, consider taking a look at the Gemini protocol, a modern equivalent. https://geminiprotocol.net/
Interesting that the article brings up the original 1990s GopherCons (which were conferences for discussing the Gopher protocol). I'm mildly annoyed that the Go programming community (which uses a gopher as a mascot) has reused the name for their conventions, but I guess it's been unused for a while.
> If one were to attempt to identify a single failure of Gopher in competition with the web, it would be the licensing costs. No such fee existed for the World Wide Web.
This, a thousand times. I watched as this happened. The instant that announcement was made, gopher was finished. Gopher might have lost later as HTML kept adding features, but by the time those features were added to HTML, gopher had already lost.
A number of people in that era thought this was a fad and that business as usual would prevail.
For all the gauzy what-could-have-been speculations about Gopher, it really was more like a hierarchical wiki. WWW's freestyle document model quickly expanded to an application platform that could support all manner and style of services. Fees or not, Gopher didn't have a chance.
The article isn't entirely correct about the early web being completely free. Netscape was not free software, at least on paper. In practice they didn't try to stop people from spreading it far and wide and I think the sales were somewhat modest despite being the core element of a technological revolution. Also, I guess NCSA Mosiac was technically around, but it lacked enough features to make it a second class citizen compared to Netscape Navigator.
For what it's worth, I have a copy of Netscape on a CD-ROM that came with a copy of PC/Computing sometime around 1994-1995. For those magazine subscribers, it was "free" if you squint a little.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Internet_Adapter
now get off my lawn!
And, conversely, the popular WWW crap.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go!_(programming_language)
8-Track instead of cassette
Minidiscs instead of CDs
Yahoo instead of Google
Gopher instead of HTTP
I want to believe that such alternative universe exists. How do I get there? I'm tired of this one...
Even the original IBM PC can comfortably browse gopher sites with gopherus[0].
0. https://gopherus.sourceforge.net/