Gopher: The Internet We Almost Had

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Before the Web became the Internet as we know it, there were other ways of finding your way around. Gopher was one of them - a menu-driven system that made it easier to explore information across the early Internet.

For a while, Gopher was a genuine competitor to the World Wide Web. Then the Web became free, Mosaic arrived, and the Internet took a very different path.

In this episode of Artifacts, I look at Gopher, what it was like to explore the early Internet through menus and directories, and what its disappearance tells us about the futures technology leaves behind.

Mentioned in this episode:

Networking & The Web | Timeline of Computer History | Computer History MuseumRFC 1436 - The Internet Gopher Protocol (a distributed document search and retrieval protocol)Internet Gopher — NSFNETThe Cutting Edge: Computing / Technology / Innovation : POSTCARDS FROM CYBERSPACE : Exploring the Depths of the Internet - Los Angeles Times

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