Annotations¶

“Within three years, the World Wide Web had bypassed it.” (Frana, 2004, p. 20) new technologies!!!!!!!!!!

“People get serious when money is at stake, and in the early 1990s lots of people came to accept the premise that large amounts of money could be made buying and selling goods on the Web.” (Frana, 2004, p. 20) connection to diffie and helman creating key exchange for ecommerce purposes

“He also did battle with the notorious Internet Worm in 1988.” (Frana, 2004, p. 21) did this contribute anything to the privacy design of Gopher?

“The client would become the user interface; the server would control document indexing and retrieval; and the protocol would govern communications between clients and servers.” (Frana, 2004, p. 22) a distributed memex

“And the current users had little interest in making it easier. In fact, there was a definite element of not wanting to make it easier, of actually wanting to keep the riffraff out.” (Frana, 2004, p. 23) Why? Wouldn't it make sense to want more people having easy access so that there was an influx of information? If more people outside of the computing expertise had access, you would have much more information that is not related to computing.

“More than 250 people attended the second Gopher conference in 1993. Among them were representatives from Apple, the Center for Networked Information Discovery and Retrieval, the Chronicle of Higher Education, IBM, Microsoft, Motorola, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Goddard Space Flight Center, the New York Times, the Northwestern Online Total Integrated System (NOTIS), the World Bank, Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), and many universities from around the world in 1993.” (Frana, 2004, p. 25) I wonder if they were there for interest in building this further or for an opportunity to make money.

“Users often did not know how Internet Gopher worked, but that did not prevent them from logging long hours looking for answers.” (Frana, 2004, p. 25) blackbox

“Most quantitatively, in December 1993, Northwestern University mathematics professor John Franks noted that the volume of posts to the Usenet group comp.infosystems.www was double that of comp.infosystems.gopher.” (Frana, 2004, p. 29) I wonder if most server hosts had both gopher and www access points before the web took over.

“For instance, McCahill made “no provisions for advertising” with Gopher because you simply “couldn’t do that.”” (Frana, 2004, p. 29) I wonder if commercialization on gopher could have changed which one was more popular??

“Several prominent members of the wired community objected to all the “callipygian naked-lady bitmaps” circulating on a sluggish Web.” (Frana, 2004, p. 32) why ditch gopher then? If the pretty pictures were the whole point, why disable it and still use a slower method of getting your info?

“The not-so-secret weapon for accomplishing this was hypertext, text embedded with clickable pointers to more text.” (Frana, 2004, p. 33) why couldn't gopher have hypertext

“Hypertext was mesmerizing, part and parcel to the underlying pattern of contemporary life; Gopher, by contrast, retired to the back highways of the information revolution, becoming a traveled route only when the preferred one was unavailable.” (Frana, 2004, p. 34) reminds me of linux vs something like macos or windows. linux is arguably more efficient but people like the way the others look

“Vielmetti remembers spending a lot of time “stitching the various systems together,” for example” (Frana, 2004, p. 35) maybe if they kept them separate, gopher being more an information library, it would survive, rather than trying to replicate the www.