Gopher
A hypertext document system and associated protocols for displaying, serving and searching such document on the Internet. Although it was introduced into the wild a little bit later than the WWW system, Gopher was from 1992 and well into 94 much more popular than the web, it was more advanced at the time since it had built in support for structured documents and searching giving rise to tools such as the VERONICA automatic Gopher search system.
Interest in Gopher waned dramatically after the University of Minnesota–Twin Cities announced in late 1993 that they would demand license fees for any commercial use of the technology and that combined with an almost total lack of development of the system by the original authors meant that by mid 1995 Gopher had all but disappeared.
Background and history
Initially developed by Farhad Anklesaria as simplification of Campus-Wide Information System (CWIS), a proposed university wide structured information system for the University of Minnesota–Twin Cities. The board of the university had agreed to fund a small team of developers that would build a client/server system that would connect the students PC and Mac based systems with the resources available on the university's mainframe computers.
OS/2 Gopher software
- GoServe - Gopher/WWW server
- IBM Gopher - Client
- Netsuite - Client
- OS/2 Gopher - Client
Links
- Please note that while the article is fairly well written and is a good overview it contains a number of factually incorrect and misleading statements.
Authors
- Mark McCahill
- Farhad Anklesaria
- David Johnson
- Bob Alberti
- Paul Lindner