CHAPTER 6

Those Who Would Be King

Gopher, WWW, Mosaic, Netscape

This chapter discusses why URLs aren't U, Why Universal Resource Locators Are Not Universal

When I first tried the experimental Gopher sites, I asked the inventors of Gopher if their system could be oriented to also support FTP, should a person be more inclined for going after something one already had researched: rather than the "browsing" that was being done so often on those Gopher servers.

The answer was technically "yes," but realistically "no," in that while Gophers COULD be configured such that every file would be accessible by BOTH Gopher and FTP, the real intent of Gopher was to bypass FTP and eventually replace it as the primary method of surfing the Internet.

I tried to explain to them that "surfing" the Internet is much more time consuming as well as wasteful of bandwidth [this at a time when all bandwidth was still free, and we were only trying to make things run faster, as opposed to actually saving money.