Where Have all the Gophers Gone? Why the Web beat Gopher (1999)

Re:Where Have all the Gophers Gone? Why the Web beat Gopher ... by IvyMike on Thursday May 21, 2020 @04:54PM (#23265137)

The NCSA and Cern web servers had the ability to let users on a system publish content from a specially named "~/public_html" directory. At UIUC, the engineering labs quietly enabled this functionality for all engineering students.

Within a week, dozens of students had their own web pages up, and by the end of the year, hundreds did. Encouraged by their initial success, this encouraged students to stand up their own web servers so they could run cgi scripts, etc.

As far as I knew, there was no equivalent taste-test for providers of Gopher content. You either stood up your own server or got special access to someone else's server, both of which were hard to do at the time.

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Re:Where Have all the Gophers Gone? Why the Web beat Gopher ... by RHSeeger on Thursday May 21, 2020 @05:50PM (#23265870)

RPI had this, too, and I remember taking full advantage of it oh so long ago.

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Re:Where Have all the Gophers Gone? Why the Web beat Gopher ... by hnzix on Thursday May 21, 2020 @06:20PM (#23266183)

In the late 90s Oz universities generally gave their students email via Pine plus a 10mb web folder as standard. Many STEM students made random websites about their hobbies or poetry or whatever. It was like a proto Geocities.

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Re:Where Have all the Gophers Gone? Why the Web beat Gopher ... by throwphoton on Thursday May 21, 2020 @09:22PM (#23267750)

And once you did that, your content was on the "World Wide Web", not just some "Gopher server". The WWW name made the venue sound more intriguing.

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Re:Where Have all the Gophers Gone? Why the Web beat Gopher ... by akie on Friday May 22, 2020 @04:13AM (#23269750)

Oh god, pine - I completely forgot about that. Thank you for bringing it up!

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Re:Where Have all the Gophers Gone? Why the Web beat Gopher ... by timClicks on Thursday May 21, 2020 @11:19PM (#23268360)

I was pretty jealous of that over here in NZ.

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Re:Where Have all the Gophers Gone? Why the Web beat Gopher ... by colechristensen on Thursday May 21, 2020 @09:24PM (#23267762)

As a student I worked as a sysadmin in the engineering department at Iowa State, we had something similar running in the mid 2000s out of anybody's home directory, it looks like it's still up and running. Some graduate students had really great information up.

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Re:Where Have all the Gophers Gone? Why the Web beat Gopher ... by phonethrowaway on Friday May 22, 2020 @01:08AM (#23268825)

Are free shell accounts still a thing?

looks like it..

https://sdf.org/

they have gopher hosting still...

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Re:Where Have all the Gophers Gone? Why the Web beat Gopher ... by 1bc29b36f623ba8 on Friday May 22, 2020 @03:43AM (#23269604)

It is, and there's plenty of small communities built around them: https://tildeverse.org

And yes. Gopher is ususally included. :)

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