dwheeler 2 years ago

As Alberti said, "licensing killed gopher": https://mncomputinghistory.com/gopher-protocol/

The WWW was given for free, gopher tried to tax the world after being given away in a what looked like a bait-and-switch. Once the tax attempt happened, gopher never had a chance, it was simply unsafe to use. And really, the WWW was better anyway - it was far more flexible.

  • msla 2 years ago

    In theory, people could have served HTML over Gopher with inline images and everything else, but it's true the Gopher model was based around text documents with distinct menu pages as opposed to marked-up documents with links in them.

  • account-5 2 years ago

    And images, the WWW supported images, gopher was about text. In my head porn helped kill gopher.

    • spicybright 2 years ago

      Gohper absolutely supports images. Basic browsers let you click a link to view it. More modern ones would inline the images.

      Gopher is different from the WWW as it's expected your browser to render content in a way you want as opposed to a standard of how each page should look.