[HN Gopher] The Internet Gopher from Minnesota
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       The Internet Gopher from Minnesota
        
       Author : rbanffy
       Score  : 30 points
       Date   : 2024-11-11 11:27 UTC (3 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.abortretry.fail)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.abortretry.fail)
        
       | jhbadger wrote:
       | 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.
        
         | halestock wrote:
         | They also took the name of a programming language that predated
         | Google's go as well.
         | 
         | https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go!_(programming_language)
        
       | jandrese wrote:
       | 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.
        
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       (page generated 2024-11-14 23:00 UTC)