What Happened to Gopher? The Internet We Lost (1991)

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What Happened to Gopher? The Internet We Lost (1991)

This episode uncovers the forgotten internet that nearly became our default way of browsing. Born out of a frustrated campus IT meeting at the University of Minnesota, Gopher spread to thousands of servers, powered universities and libraries, ran the White House’s first online presence, and even hosted early versions of the World Wide Web itself.

For a brief moment, it looked like Gopher would define how the world navigated information. This video traces its rise, the licensing decision that derailed it, and the strange afterlife of a protocol that still survives today as a minimalist, almost philosophical alternative to the modern internet.

Gopher is a communication protocol designed for distributing, searching, and retrieving documents in Internet Protocol networks.

The design of the Gopher protocol and user interface is menu-driven, and presented an alternative to the World Wide Web in its early stages, but ultimately fell into disfavor, yielding to Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). The Gopher ecosystem is often regarded as the effective predecessor of the World Wide Web.

The Gopher system was released in mid-1991 by Mark P. McCahill, Farhad Anklesaria, Paul Lindner, Daniel Torrey, and Bob Alberti of the University of Minnesota in the United States

Its central goals were, as stated in RFC 1436:

- A file-like hierarchical arrangement that would be familiar to users.

- A simple syntax.

- A system that can be created quickly and inexpensively.

- Extensibility of the file system metaphor; allowing addition of searches for example.

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What Happened to Gopher? The Internet We Lost (1991)

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