Before the Web There Was Gopher Philip L. Frana Charles Babbage Institute The World Wide Web, universally well known today, was preceded by an efficient software tool that was fondly named Gopher. The Internet Gopher, much like the Web, enabled users to obtain information quickly and easily. Why, then, did it disappear but the Web did not? Gopher faded into obscurity for two main reasons: hypertext and commerce. Before the Web there was Gopher, a nearly anymore, despite the efforts of a handful of defunct Internet application protocol and asso- individuals to revitalize the protocol. Why did ciated client and server software.1 In the early Gopher fail? Many Gopher aficionados have a 1990s, Gopher burrowed a crucial path ready answer: pretty pictures. For them, the through a perceived bottleneck on the Web won and Gopher lost because the Web Information Superhighway. Internet Gopher could display vibrant images of, for example, passed away as a technological and social phe- hand-woven Turkish rugs, animated glyphs of nomenon quickly: Its inventors released mice stuffing email into virtual mailboxes, and Gopher in 1991. Within three years, the World blinking advertising banners. Clearly, the Wide Web had bypassed it. Most people who “Gopher faithful”—as they are often called— surf the Web today have no idea what Gopher are right about the importance of pictures. is, but in the 1990s it helped usher in a new age People get serious when money is at stake, and of user-friendly access to a rapidly growing uni- in the early 1990s lots of people came to accept verse of online information. the premise that large amounts of money could The name Gopher, unlike so many other be made buying and selling goods on the Web. computer-related mnemonics and acronyms, And commerce is usually greatly facilitated by really does convey something about what the being able to see the goods. application does. In the vernacular, a “go-fer” But the extant primary literature on is someone who fetches things, like coffee. Gopher—much of it available only in digital Gopher retrieved data placed on servers con- form—provides tantalizing clues, indicating nected to the Internet and served as a gateway that this answer does not go far enough. For to other Internet services. Gophers are also bur- instance, Gopher in its many client incarna- rowing mammals, mirroring the way users tun- tions did not prevent or discourage the display neled through a vast digital landscape with of images found in cyberspace—quite the Internet Gopher. Gopher addicts spent count- opposite. It just gave access to them in a way less sleepless hours burrowing through the no longer appreciated. On the other hand, information repository known as many early Web browser users turned the Gopherspace.2 Finally, the Golden Gopher is graphics capabilities off so that pages loaded the mascot of the University of Minnesota, more quickly.4 And concomitant activity for a birthplace of Internet Gopher. privatized national information infrastruc- Professional information managers are ture—which facilitated the growth of a visually quick to point out that data has little value rich commercial presence on the Internet— unless organized in a meaningful way. Internet seems more staging than chief protagonist in Gopher’s inventors demonstrated one way to Gopher’s decline. add value to the mass of data available on the Most important, I believe, was the threat Internet. They developed software to system- posed to Gopher by hypertext. The motivations atize, arrange, and contextualize data like doc- of Gopher’s primary architects and developers uments, audio files, and images.3 Other led to the creation of a particular type of brows- software developers contributed to the effort, able information system that—on the surface creating even more software for searching and at least—appeared incompatible with the delivering “gopherized” content quickly, easi- model embodied by the World Wide Web. ly, and cheaply. Where the Web’s principal developers, most But Gopher as a technology is rarely used notably Tim Berners-Lee, emphasized distrib- 20 IEEE Annals of the History of Computing Published by the IEEE Computer Society 1058-6180/04/$20.00 © 2004 IEEE Authorized licensed use limited to: University of Michigan Library. Downloaded on January 4, 2010 at 13:01 from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply. uted processes that linked data in a nonlinear Macintosh computer software to replace Elm, a or decentered fashion with hypertext, Gopher’s popular 1980s email system.8 The team’s principal developers stressed and heavily val- answer was the PC-friendly POPMail (POP ued their clients’ library-like hierarchical inter- stands for post office protocol). face. The Web epitomized the fluid and opaque McCahill considered Elm an acceptable mail postmodernist ethos. Gopher, by contrast, delivery system but one that was too difficult cleaved to the classical-modernist aesthetic of for “secretaries and nontechnical people.”9 Ease technology as one-dimensional, systematic, of operation for the uninitiated computer user and transparent, with “depths that can be was of great importance to McCahill, but plumbed and understood.”5 POPMail also steeped his group in new ideas In this article, I argue that interest in about distributed computing and client-server Gopher waned because its least distributed, Internet applications. Some Gopher code came most hierarchical quality—cascading file straight from the team’s finished email client. menus—failed to hold the interest of a growing Work on the email software provided both an number of software developers, administrators, ideology and the relevant expertise to ulti- and inexpert users introduced to an icono- mately develop Internet Gopher. graphic, hypertextual online environment. A widespread movement for campuswide information systems (CWIS, pronounced Origins of Gopher “kwiss”) in the late 1980s and early 1990s exac- Internet Gopher was conceived in the erbated ongoing conflicts between the propo- Microcomputer, Workstation, and Networks nents of mainframe and PC environments. The Center on the Twin Cities campus of the CWIS was envisioned as a complex informa- University of Minnesota. The Gopher team’s tion space where students, faculty, and staff leader, Mark McCahill, had his first brush with could engage in electronic self-publishing, computing in eighth grade, writing Basic pro- retrieve course information, and have access to grams on his school’s time-sharing terminal. email, the online library catalog, campus Later, as a University of Minnesota undergrad- phone book, and other remote facilities.10 uate, McCahill found computers to be a University administrators across the country turnoff. “There was a Fortran course that you had to make a choice: side with the mainframe had to take [where] you had to do punch establishment or side with the PC radicals in cards,” McCahill remembers. “I hated it building their CWISes. because sitting and typing stuff on those key- University of Minnesota officials first pro- punches and then submitting a deck to the posed a mainframe CWIS in late 1990. At this operator … it just wasn’t interactive.”6 point, some of the earliest CWISes had already Instead, McCahill became infatuated with been running for several years at Cornell chemistry. Later, working as a summer intern University (CUinfo), Iowa State (Cynet), on a federal grant studying water and sewage Princeton (PNN), and elsewhere.11 The first treatment plants, he met a group using an attempt to design a CWIS on the University of Apple II computer to analyze effluent. “It was Minnesota campus, however, quickly degener- interactive enough that it was fun,” he remem- ated into what microcomputer and workstation bers. McCahill began considering a career programmer Farhad Anklesaria later called “a change, taking more computer science classes classic design-by-committee monstrosity.”12 at the university, and looking for a job doing The fight over the CWIS between mainframe microcomputer support in the computer center. and personal computing proponents briefly McCahill quickly made a name for himself turned ugly.13 McCahill, for his part, called the as a gifted application programmer within the university’s mainframe CWIS proposal “crazy” university’s computer center, working his way and proceeded to ignore it entirely.14 up to manager of the microcomputer and The Internet Gopher Team learned much workstations systems group. He also did battle from the experience, as participants and with the notorious Internet Worm in 1988.7 bystanders. They grew firmer in their dislike of By the late 1980s McCahill, like many of his design by committee, preferring instead a freer fellow “PC and workstation radicals,” began exchange of ideas. They confirmed their suspi- butting heads with the administrators of main- cions that the proposed information system frame computers, the then-workhorses of cam- ought to follow the distributed model, with pus computing. “We had the distributed content published directly from anyone’s per- computing religion in a big way,” recalls sonal computer, not just from central adminis- McCahill. One of his group’s first distributed tration computers. “We got the idea that computing projects was the writing of maybe we should let the people who create the January–March 2004 21 Authorized licensed use limited to: University of Michigan Library. Downloaded on January 4, 2010 at 13:01 from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply. Internet Gopher information publish it under their own com- things NeXT was flogging with [their] machine puters,” McCahill later explained.9 was, “Hey, there’s a digital library.” In other McCahill and Anklesaria soon submitted words, full-text searches over a body of work. … their own PC-oriented proposal. They recom- I said, “Great, if we could weave full-text search- mended building a Gopher system composed es onto a hierarchical structure”—the hierarchy of three unique parts: clients, servers, and the gives you a way to browse and organize the Gopher protocol.