Gopher: The Internet We Almost Had

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There was a time when you could connect to the internet, type a command,

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and be presented with a list of places you could go.

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Not websites, not search results, not apps. Just a list.

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You might see something like information about Gopher, microcomputer news and

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prices, libraries, news, discussion groups, other Gopher and information servers.

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You picked one and that opened another list. You picked something from that

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list, and maybe you got a document, or another menu, or a search tool.

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And if you kept going, you could find yourself somewhere else entirely.

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Perhaps another university, another library, another country.

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Without ever really thinking about where the information was physically stored.

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It sounds really basic now, but in the early 1990s, this was one of the ways

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the internet started to make sense.

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This was Gopher. And, for a little while, Gopher wasn't some forgotten piece of internet history.

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It was one of the ways the future might have looked.

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Gopher was developed at the University of Minnesota in 1991, initially as part

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of its campus-wide information system.

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The idea was fairly straightforward. There were lots of computers connected

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to networks, and those computers contained lots of useful information.

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But actually finding that information could be difficult.

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The internet wasn't a place of browsers and search engines that we know today.

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If you wanted something, you often needed to know which computer had it,

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what service it was running, and how to get there.

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Gopher tried to hide some of that complexity. The 1993 Gopher protocol describes

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a system where information could live across many different servers while the

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client presented it to the user as a hierarchy of items and directories, much like a file system.

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The designers deliberately kept the underlying protocol simple,

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making it easier to implement, but also efficient for the computers and networks of the time.

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And that simplicity was the point. You didn't necessarily need to understand

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how the internet worked, You just needed to know how to choose something from a menu.

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An early guide to the internet described Gopher as a useful tool for navigating

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online resources, giving users access to things like university systems,

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library catalogues, e-books and government information.

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The internet was enormous and Gopher gave it shelves.

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And that's what made Gopher interesting. It wasn't some obscure little system

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that existed for a few enthusiasts before the World Wide Web came along and replaced it.

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Gopher was genuinely important. The Computer History Museum describes it as

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the web's most direct internet competitor, noting that it was growing faster

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than the web in the early 1990s and had been embraced by educational institutions and the US Congress.

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And it was something appealing about the way it worked.

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You didn't necessarily need to know exactly what you were looking for before you started.

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You could just open a menu, see what was there, follow something that caught

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your attention and keep moving through the network from one place to another.

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A 1994 Washington Post guide described Gopher almost like a map for the internet,

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showing newcomers where they could go without having to learn the commands required

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by older tools such as FTP and Telnet.

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One Gopher server it featured presented users with options for the campus,

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classrooms, community, government, library, research and the wider world.

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And that was the appeal. The internet was enormous but Gopher gave you somewhere to start.

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And then it was the World Wide Web, which, as we now know, won.

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But this is where the story gets a lot more interested in the version we usually tell.

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Because when we look back to that time, it's really easy to imagine that the

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web was always going to win.

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Of course people were going to end up with web pages. Of course we'd have browsers.

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Of course we'd click links and move from one piece of information to another.

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Except none of that was obvious at the time.

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People were making decisions based on internet that existed at the time,

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not the internet we now know was coming.

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And that's important because Gopher wasn't a bad idea waiting to be replaced by a better one.

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It was a good idea that happened to be standing at a very important crossroads.

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Then, in 1993, something changed. The University of Minnesota announced that

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it would begin charging licensing fees for its Gopher server software.

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And it's tempting to think that because Minnesota put a price on Gopher,

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everyone immediately ran away.

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But that's too cut and dry. The licensing announcement concerned the University

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of Minnesota's implementation, rather than meaning that every Gopher server

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everywhere had suddenly become a paid service.

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And the university itself was dealing with funding pressures around the continued

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development and support of Gopher.

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But the announcement still mattered, because it created uncertainty around a

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technology that had been spreading quickly.

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And then, almost at exactly the same moment, the web got an enormous advantage.

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On April 30, 1993, CERN, which is the European Organisation for Nuclear Research,

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made the web's technology freely usable by anyone without fees being payable to CERN.

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Then Mosaic arrived Mosaic wasn't the web itself But it made the web much easier

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for ordinary computer users to experience,

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Instead of a primarily text-based interface You had a graphical browser,

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documents, images and links that you could click The web started to feel less

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like a collection of computer systems And more like a place you could explore,

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And that made a huge difference.

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There's also a detail about Mosaic that I really like. It wasn't necessarily

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telling you to forget about everything else.

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It could access Gopher. It could access FTP.

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It could access other internet services.

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In other words, the web didn't arrive in a completely separate universe.

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It became the interface through which people could reach the things that had already been there.

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And that was key. Gopher had a hierarchy. You started somewhere and followed a path.

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The web had hyperlinks, so you could be reading one thing, see a link,

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follow it somewhere completely different, then follow another link from there.

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The structure wasn't imposed on you quite the same way. You could wonder.

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And eventually, that became one of the defining characteristics of being online.

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There's something else worth remembering here. Gopher didn't lose because it

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was useless, and it didn't lose because everyone suddenly realised that menus were terrible.

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The menu structure was actually one of its strengths. It gave people a real

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straightforward way into a network that was otherwise becoming increasingly difficult to navigate.

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The problem was, the web was becoming better at something Gopher wasn't built

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around, connecting things in unexpected ways.

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Gopher was very good at organising information. The web became very good at

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letting people create connections between information.

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And once graphical browsers made that experience accessible to more people,

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the balance began to shift. And that's what I find interesting when thinking about Go4Now.

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Not that it disappeared, not even that it lost to the web. It's that for a brief

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period, the internet could have looked a lot different.

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We know the ending, so it's easy to forget that the people living through it didn't.

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We didn't know that the web would become the centre of everything.

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We didn't know we'd eventually carry the internet around in our pockets,

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or that the browser would become one of the most important pieces of software

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on almost every computer.

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We were just trying things. Gopher was one of these things, and for a while,

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it was a pretty good answer.

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I think that's something we can lose when we talk about technology as history.

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We tend to tell the stories of the things that survived, the platforms that

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became enormous, the devices that ended up in everyone's homes,

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and the websites and services that became part of everyday life.

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But alongside all of these were technologies that went in different directions,

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disappeared or simply arrived at the wrong moment.

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There were different ways of organising information, different ways of communicating,

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different ideas about what an online community might look like,

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how people might find things and even what being online was supposed to feel like.

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Most of these possibilities disappear so completely we forgot there were ever possibilities.

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Gopher is a little different, because if you look at one of these old menus

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today, you can still see the shape of that alternative future.

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A quiet, text-based internet, a network of information organised into paths.

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Gopher is a reminder that the internet we have isn't the internet we were destined

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to have, it's just the version that survived.

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And that happens around us all the time. Technologies disappear,

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platforms close, interfaces change.

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Things that once seemed like the future become footnotes.

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And sometimes, years later, you find one of these old Artifacts and realise

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that what you're looking at isn't just an obsolete piece of technology.

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It's a record of a future that never happened.

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I'm Danny Brown, and this is Artifacts.