Gopher Still Going Strong

from the who-needs-the-web? dept

In 1993, most of my internet usage was based around email and gopher. Gopher, if you didn't use it, is a pre-web internet protocol for presenting text with hypertext links. I used to use gopher to check the weather report every morning. It wasn't long after I became addicted to gopher that I first heard about the "web" which I was told would replace gopher. It certainly made sense, though, I assumed the web was only a stepping stone to the next technology that would go beyond the web. It seems that the web became quite a lot more than I expected, and gopher has pretty much disappeared completely - except that it hasn't. There are some people who are still actively maintaining gopher sites and are even pushing for it to be used in more areas - such as for wireless devices. Of course, I'm not sure what (if any) advantages gopher really has over WAP, which didn't exactly set the world on fire as a wireless protocol for displaying hyperlinked text info on wireless devices (though, is now finding new uses more fitting for the technology).