The story of Gopher's rise and fall is both fascinating and complex. Important influences in the process were both technological and sociological. This paper does not provide any one definitive answer to why history played itself out as it did. Instead, I have attempted to refute the very notion that such a unitary answer is either desirable or possible. I have found the concept of mind share to be a useful way of presenting the influences involved without the need to commit to a specific causal chain of events. My hope is that the result can contribute positively to the ongoing historical dialog on why the Internet that so many of us use developed in the way it did.

The 1968 DemoEngelbart dreamed of technology and tools that increased our Collective Intelligence and gave us a stunning example of how it works. Now it's up to us to take up the challenge. To celebrate the 40th anniversary of Engelbart's astounding demo, the Program for the Future is bringing together some of the best minds in science, media, business and education -- and we hope you will be among them -- to explore the question: what's next?

By focusing on the period from 1963 to 1976, the authors capture the emotion and revolutionary nature of moving from a fundamentally print information service system, to one that is chiefly based on online systems without getting lost in the expanse of the entire evolution from Vannevar Bush to the networked web. Service, as opposed to system, is the key word in the book's title. By focusing on overall services rather than narrowing in on the systems themselves, the book transcends its encyclopedic narrative and somewhat numbing detail to present a balanced focus on people, events, and products. This holistic approach enables the writers to interject compelling biographical narratives of the key players who took developing online systems from experimental to fundamental components of information service. The best example is chapter five, where the long and winding development of DIALOG is bolstered by insights into integral service developers such as Roger Summit and Van Wente.

Every field of history has a basic need for a detailed chronology of what happened: who did what when. In the absence of such a resource, fanciful accounts flourish. This book provides a rich narrative of the early development of online information retrieval systems and services, from 1963 to 1976--a period important to anyone who uses a search engine, online catalog, or large database. Drawing on personal experience, extensive research, and interviews with many of the key participants, the book describes the individuals, projects, and institutions of the period. It also corrects many common errors and misconceptions and provides milestones for many of the significant developments in online systems and technology.

Next Thursday, November 20th, Steve Blank will be giving a lunchtime talk at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View on the Secret History of Silicon Valley. You can check out a previous video of his talk below:

"The ARPA Network allows dissimilar, geographically separated computers (Hosts) to communicate with each other by connecting each Host into the network through an Interface Message Processor (IMP); the IMPs themselves form a subnetwork that can be thought of as a distributed computation system. To detect failures in this system each IMP automatically and per- iodically examines itself and its environment and reports the results to the Network Control Center (NCC), at Bolt Beranek and Newman, Inc., for action. The NCC computer, like any other Host, can itself fail without affecting network integrity; further, the NCC central processor can easily be replaced, in case of failure, by any standard IMP.

"But before we go too far, let's take a moment and have a look at just what the Internet is and what it takes to start surfing through Cyberspace. You may already be a net surfer and you may want to skip this section, but if you're just starting out, we suggest you spend a few minutes getting familiar with some of the most common Internet terms." Dig that mid-1990s design aesthetic. Grey background, huge 3D rendered header graphic, Times New Roman italic, centered text... It's 1995, all right.

One wag in our office says “Second Life is the Gopher of virtual worlds; it looks so good because there is so little else to look at.” That will not remain true; there is no doubt a WWW for virtual worlds out there. On other Second Life fronts, I went to visit the ibiblio homestead on SL today. It was gone. We must have had a subsubsubsubprime morgage the invisible second hand of SL economics moved swiftly and our building was no more.

When did cyberpunk die? I ask. / "1993," smirks somebody. "The release of the Billy Idol record."

This version of Vivian Sobchack's essay was originally published in Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture, ed. Mark Dery (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995): 11-28.

There is a good chance that greed has killed gopher. Certainly, IMHO, this puts an end to gopher+.

Linkbloggers also need to study how to craft short headlines that boil down stories to their essence-- hardly anybody has even recognised the importance of this

good references on history of the net; the page itself is an amazing early web throwback dense with information and animated gif graphics. ZOWIE

So the message itself, and the thread that gave rise to it, are here. The exact date of the smiley’s birth can now be determined: 19 September, 1982. It’s great to have this message back just in time for the 20th anniversary of the original post.

must let hawkexpress know about this

The guy wrangling the whole operation was Bill English, on a direct line to Doug’s ear, so he could tell him when to stall while a bug was fixed in real time or the system could catch up, talk to my ear about what to shoot next, etc. It was ballet on a

i'm losing my edge to the kids / but I was there

"We shall see a web spun of wires"

Back in 1992, one of the answers was "we haven't figured out how to bill for them yet". Note the ethos of a bygone day.

HYPE ALERT: WHY CYBERSPACE ISN'T, AND WILL NEVER BE, NIRVANA. Cliff Stoll rant.

"It's a perfect Marxist state, where almost nobody does any business," says Farber. "But at some point that will have to change."

Lately, I've started collecting old VHS tapes about the Internet from the early- to mid-1990s. While most of these are pretty corny -- think Gabe and Max's Internet Thing -- they also inadvertently captured pieces of the web that don't exist anywhere else

in a comment: "Internet in the 90s was like the wild west: difficult but rewarding. Present day Internet is like kill-yourself suburbia: convenient but soul-sucking."

"sorry for rejecting your paper on HTML and HTTP - I was wrong". short video

delicious, not essays; other people; search before posting; be yourself; edit the title; awesome! ; credit the source; warn about weird; be a fan; repetition is the very soul of the net.

Under the leadership of NSF program managers Jennings, Steve Wolff, and Jane Caviness, NSFNET evolved to a three-tiered architecture: backbone, regional networks, and campus networks.

Wolfgang Schroeter of IBM presented the current state of EASInet as well as the EASInet and EASIgate connection and usage guidelines. EASIgate is IBM's name for the CERN-CORNELL T1 link.

He became very involved in the early stages of the NSFNET networking efforts, and was a Principal Investigator for the NSFNET backbone project since the 1987 NSFNET award to Merit. While being Principal Investigator, the NSFNET backbone became the core in

Media Advisory 07-038
Early Internet Pioneers Meeting This Week to Celebrate NSFNET: "The Partnership that Changed the World"

Event will mark the 20th anniversary of the creation of the modern Internet.
NSFNET T1 Backbone and Regional Network

Septic routing – a dose of reality

USAN (192.17.4) is currently gatewayed to ARPANET via a fuzzball at U Michigan on an experimental basis. The fuzzball gateway is gimmicked with an incredible routing algorithm that provides connectivity for all the j-random networks babbling on the USAN c

The NSF Network Technical Advisory Group (NTAG), which serves as advisor to NSF staff on network issues in general, including gateways for the explosively growing NSF Internet community, created an ad-hoc subcommittee to establish a first cut at Internet

While it applies specifically to National Science Foundation research programs, the requirements are stated in a general context and are believed applicable throughout the Internet community.

But history has failed to document this transitional period in any detail. Dr Doug Gale, president of Information Technology Associates, in Montana, is devoting his spare time to filling in the gaps.

The project has a degree of urgency. Becuase of the highly distributed nature of the Internet many of the physical records from the period are in the possession of individuals and are being discarded. Additionally, with the passage of time participant's m

The Internet has been a startling and dramatic success. Originally designed to link together a small group of researchers, the Internet is now used by many millions of people. However, multimedia applications, with their novel traffic characteristics and

Marking a new phase for the Internet, the NSFNET Backbone was decommissioned at midnight on April 30, 1995. The National Science Foundation, which established the NSFNET Program in 1985, began an effort two years ago to privatize the backbone functions.

In June 1985, a meeting of representatives of New York State’s leading academic institutions convenes at Cornell University to discuss the creation of a statewide electronic network to connect New York’s major research universities and corporations to

Web 2.0 What Went Wrong?

Once upon a time there was a magazine called Wired. Volume 1, Number 1 came out, it was all about the stuff I was doing, and I was hooked. But I was frustrated by the things it didn't write about, and so I put together a tiny newsletter called Tubed.

As of GopherCon ‘92, Ed Vielmetti was talking about how Gopher had basically surpassed WWW in common usage. Today, the WWW is ubiquitous, and Ed’s got a TypePad blog – what factors do you think influenced that change?

The initial objective of this project is to create a digital archive of source materials covering the pivotal years when federal R&D support laid the foundation for the modern Internet.

At dinner I was sitting between the past and the future: on one side of me was a man who said that the creation of NSFnet, when none of us knew what we were doing and everything was possible, was the best time of his life. On the other side was someone wh

first band to broadcast on the internet; they opened for the rolling stones.

original 1987 thread of station wagon full of bits

Spacewar (the original!) in Java!

We estimate there were 70 different kinds of machines, although it's difficult to know for sure since they were made at facilities that were closed to the public," said Maxim Pinigin, the museum's custodian. To set up the museum, Pinigin, along with three

nice feature on knuth

nice origin story of twitter and an original design, on paper. paper! this rocks.

history of video games project at stanford

Ann Arbor Softworks developed FullWrite, which claimed to be the first fully WYSIWYG word processor, and which was also one of the most notoriously prolonged instances of vaporware in computing history.

a message i forwarded about a project thomas krichel was doing in 1992.

South Korea as a Windows only, no Mac, no firefox software monoculture. & the dangers thereof.

user space filesystem for mounting remote FTP sites, from 1992.

via groff

guest book in memory of bernie galler

Celebration on 9/29/2006.

from 1991, frozen as if in amber at the U of Toronto. Tim Berners-Lee surfed here and all that.

1988 reference for Waterloo SCRIPT based GML text layout language

Jaron Lanier essay (an "old-timer") on the net.

Brewster Kahle's amazing project

page from the log notebook

some nice history of the internet graphs.

nice exhibit of a bunch of old gear (UK and European focus)

Web to WAIS to Web to news to ftp, in 1992

precision radio-carbon dating of the source

Vannevar Bush's original paper with a design for a system to capture human thought trails