Kermit was similarly hindered by its licensing.
It is an open protocol with open source implementations now. Just a bit too late.
University of Minnesota Gopher software licensing policy (1993)
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Re: University of Minnesota Gopher software licensing policy (1993)
#22In 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
Really excellent read still!
Re: University of Minnesota Gopher software licensing policy (1993)
#23Earlier 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…
Tangentially, it turns out one could use late 70s technology to store 5gb of data on a VHS tape: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xSnrQBfBCzY
Re: University of Minnesota Gopher software licensing policy (1993)
#24Earlier 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…
Tangentially, it turns out one could use late 70s technology to store 5gb of data on a VHS tape: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xSnrQBfBCzY
And of course there was an Amiga package for it: http://www.hugolyppens.com/VBS.html
Re: University of Minnesota Gopher software licensing policy (1993)
#25The 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
A few people had t1 connections to their home, something i was jealous of, but no way I could afford the cost. By the time I graduated ISDN was available and my company paid for it so even affordable. DSL came soon after and was affordable to 'normal' people.
Re: University of Minnesota Gopher software licensing policy (1993)
#26 > Remember when UNIX was given away free?
> How many of you are using UNIX now? It is licensed.
Re: University of Minnesota Gopher software licensing policy (1993)
#27The 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
This is simply not true. My grandpa was an early adopter in '92 and had an internet connection to his home in Little Falls, MN.
Re: University of Minnesota Gopher software licensing policy (1993)
#28Good article on the history of Gopher:
The rise and fall of the Gopher protocol
https://www.minnpost.com/business/2016/08/rise-and-fall-goph...
Re: University of Minnesota Gopher software licensing policy (1993)
#29The 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
Even if that isn't 100% ubiquitously true, it's true enough to provide important context, so thanks for that.
My overall point doesn't just apply to this instance, though. It's something I see all over the place, even today; particularly in conversations about moderation and censorship.
Content has been siloed off so intensely that it's hard to even imagine a modern internet without arbitrary borders. Most of those borders are made across organizational lines. They are often made out of copyright, with the notion that some deserving party will be monetarily compensated.
Those borders usually don't align to the content itself. Instead, they become arbitrary hurdles, or even walls; making it unfeasible or impossible to truly benefit from content. Nearly every incompatibility in software was created intentionally, to cement and enforce these borders.
Now inference models (overconfidently called AI) like LLMs are all the rage. What do they do? They draw new borders. What are those borders meant to align with? The patterns that are already present in the content itself.
Re: University of Minnesota Gopher software licensing policy (1993)
#30What a time capsule of how early free-ish software tried to monetize itself and the odd politics of University computer systems. I was curious about Yen and saw a small bio about him: https://chinacenter.umn.edu/umn-china/history/alumni/disting... Its a bit interesting, and shocking, some of the members of the teams behind proto-HTTP software in the 90s were college graduates in the early 60s. If I'm doing my math co…
I never really questioned why it was called gopher until today...but it makes sense. (Goldy the Gopher is the university mascot)