[IP] Re: NSF and the Birth of the Internet

[David Farber <dave@farber.net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: Abe Singer <abe@oyvay.nu>
Date: August 19, 2008 4:33:21 PM EDT
To: David Farber <dave@farber.net>
Subject: Re: [IP] Re:      NSF and the Birth of the Internet

For IP if you wish.

In my experience, licensing was not a big contributor to gopher's
demise.

In the early part of the 1990s I worked at the UCSD library, and set up
some of the first gopher servers and web servers on the campus.

Licensing never came up as an issue over our whether or not we continued
to use gopher.

Our librarians switched from gopher to web because the web had better
features.  The web offered not just graphics, but text formatting/layout
capabilities that gave the librarians a better opportunity to organize
information in a manner appropriate to the subject.

Gopher also suffered from a severe lack of documentation which hampered
its usability.  To wit, I started on a reference manual (by  
painstakingly
testing each option) for gopher which I never finished, but years later
found that people (at other Universities even) were still using my
document due to lack of other resoures.

-- Abe

> Begin forwarded message:
>
> From: Robert Alberti <alberti@sanction.net>
> Date: August 19, 2008 9:34:17 AM EDT
> Subject: Re: [IP] Re:      NSF and the Birth of the Internet
>
> Gopher introduced (and suffered for so doing) the concept of software
> licensing to the Internet. Nowadays the Internet is SO commercialized
> that it can be hard to remember that in 1993 most domain names ended
> in .EDU or .MIL. Domain names that ended in .COM were considered  
> crass.
> Commercial use of the Internet was anathema to many, who insisted that
> since it was developed with public resources it should always be free
> and open. However, supporting Gopher was quickly consuming all of the
> resources of the tiny University of Minnesota department to which I  
> and
> my colleagues belonged. It was our (undoubtedly clumsily handled)
> suggestion that Gopher software be commercially licensed that caused
> many of its users to abandon Gopher for the Web, which was in any case
> growing quickly in popularity.




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