Those Who Would Be King
Gopher, WWW, Mosaic, Netscape
This chapter discusses why URLs aren't U,
Why Universal Resource Locators Are Not Universal
When I first tried the experimental Gopher sites, I asked
the inventors of Gopher if their system could be oriented
to also support FTP, should a person be more inclined for
going after something one already had researched: rather
than the "browsing" that was being done so often on those
Gopher servers.
The answer was technically "yes," but realistically "no,"
in that while Gophers COULD be configured such that every
file would be accessible by BOTH Gopher and FTP, the real
intent of Gopher was to bypass FTP and eventually replace
it as the primary method of surfing the Internet.
I tried to explain to them that "surfing" the Internet is
much more time consuming as well as wasteful of bandwidth
[this at a time when all bandwidth was still free, and we
were only trying to make things run faster, as opposed to
actually saving money.