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University of Minnesota Gopher software licensing policy (1993)

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Re: University of Minnesota Gopher software licensing policy (1993)

#11

Post by ghaff »

joezydeco wrote: post #7
bombcar wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The HTTP web really took off with good search engines. Before that it was much more curated on other methods. Even ftp!

Everyone forgets the "directory" era. There was a time when Yahoo was the primary way to find things on the web. Getting your new website listed there was like winning the SEO wars.

I don't remember the timeframes exactly but at one point, I had a local "home page" on my Unix workstation that was basically a graphic and the links I was most interested in. Yahoo was probably there. Search engines were coming in but I mostly bounced around until Google came along. AltaVista was early on.

Re: University of Minnesota Gopher software licensing policy (1993)

#12

Post by kstrauser »

ska wrote: post #9
meepmorp wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Back in the day, there were hosts on the internet that let you browse their entire filesystem via ftp. This was in the days before shadow password files were a thing, too. I'm too upstanding of a citizen to have done so, but a friend of a friend once spent a couple weeks of computer time running crack on those things and managed to gain shell access to some of the machines.

If you had such a ftp service, there was a good chance that eventually you'd end up unwittingly serving porn out of a twisted little maze of nested directories with embedded special characters an the like. This killed a fair few useful-but-not-important sites.

At one point a well-known FTP server would let you access it with Samba, complete with R/W access to certain directories. I had an Amiga with a small hard drive, a modem, and the "VMM" virtual memory program. Experiments led to me creating a 2GB sparse file on the FTP server, mounting that server as a volume, and pointing VMM at that sparse file. Voila! An Amiga with 2GB of RAM, so long as you didn't mind swapping at about 5KB per second.

That was completely useless, but it was great fun to get working at all. I hope my sparse file was actually sparse on the server, too.

Re: University of Minnesota Gopher software licensing policy (1993)

#13

Post by schoen »

kstrauser wrote: post #12
ska wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you had such a ftp service, there was a good chance that eventually you'd end up unwittingly serving porn out of a twisted little maze of nested directories with embedded special characters an the like. This killed a fair few useful-but-not-important sites.

At one point a well-known FTP server would let you access it with Samba, complete with R/W access to certain directories. I had an Amiga with a small hard drive, a modem, and the "VMM" virtual memory program. Experiments led to me creating a 2GB sparse file on the FTP server, mounting that server as a volume, and pointing VMM at that sparse file. Voila! An Amiga with 2GB of RAM, so long as you didn't mind swapping at…

> An Amiga with 2GB of RAM

Huh, what did the Amiga's memory model look like? Could you construct a pointer to 2 GB different locations? Did it have segments like the 8086 or something?

Re: University of Minnesota Gopher software licensing policy (1993)

#15

Post by dwheeler »

1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #14

In his book about the early web, Berners-Lee claimed this is what sunk gopher. ["Weaving the Web" (1999)]

I agree with him. It was huge news when the licensing model was announced. Many people had expected it to be freely available. The day it was announced was the day that Web growth truly began. The rats didnt just jump from the ship, they created new ships. I feel bad for Bob Alberti in particular.

Re: University of Minnesota Gopher software licensing policy (1993)

#16

Post by kstrauser »

schoen wrote: post #13
kstrauser wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At one point a well-known FTP server would let you access it with Samba, complete with R/W access to certain directories. I had an Amiga with a small hard drive, a modem, and the "VMM" virtual memory program. Experiments led to me creating a 2GB sparse file on the FTP server, mounting that server as a volume, and pointing VMM at that sparse file. Voila! An Amiga with 2GB of RAM, so long as you didn't mind swapping at…

> An Amiga with 2GB of RAM Huh, what did the Amiga's memory model look like? Could you construct a pointer to 2 GB different locations? Did it have segments like the 8086 or something?

It had a 32-bit address bus, so that was a nice, flat 2GB of directly addressable locations.

Edit: You might've been asking a different question. Toward the end, lots of Amigas had MMUs, either as a separate chip or built in to the CPU. VMM and similar programs used the MMU to implement paging.

Re: University of Minnesota Gopher software licensing policy (1993)

#17

Post by kragen »

1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #14

In his book about the early web, Berners-Lee claimed this is what sunk gopher. ["Weaving the Web" (1999)]

rohit khare's 'who killed gopher? an extensible murder mystery' points out several other factors

https://ics.uci.edu/~rohit/IEEE-L7-http-gopher.html

Re: University of Minnesota Gopher software licensing policy (1993)

#18

Post by schoen »

kstrauser wrote: post #16
schoen wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> An Amiga with 2GB of RAM Huh, what did the Amiga's memory model look like? Could you construct a pointer to 2 GB different locations? Did it have segments like the 8086 or something?

It had a 32-bit address bus, so that was a nice, flat 2GB of directly addressable locations. Edit: You might've been asking a different question. Toward the end, lots of Amigas had MMUs, either as a separate chip or built in to the CPU. VMM and similar programs used the MMU to implement paging.

Those are both interesting answers, and I didn't really know anything about the Amiga's architecture (other than to have imagined wrongly that it might have had 16-bit addresses). Thanks.

Re: University of Minnesota Gopher software licensing policy (1993)

#19

Post by kragen »

thomastjeffery wrote: post #8

The great mistake I see here: everyone worth discussing is an organization . The best corners of the internet are not groups of people: they are collections of content . The content cannot pay you a license fee. The content cannot demand itself be constrained to non-profit ends.

in 01993 only organizations had internet connections

i mean in some places you could get a dialup slip connection from something like netcom, but you would put the files you wanted to share on netcom's ftp server, not your own

Re: University of Minnesota Gopher software licensing policy (1993)

#20

Post by kragen »

bombcar wrote: post #5
meepmorp wrote: post #3

I remember using Mosaic for the first time and thinking that it sucked ass in comparison to gopher - so much less information available, and it was very hard to just browse the hierarchy to see what was on a server. On the other hand, I kind of miss Mosaic's ability to easily turn off image loading. There's more than a few sites that'd be improved by using that feature.

The HTTP web really took off with good search engines. Before that it was much more curated on other methods. Even ftp!

archie (ftp search engine) and jughead and veronica (gopher search engines) predated even the wwww (world wide web worm) search engine for the www
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