Gopher existed in something of a vacuum for many years. Only three types of people ever really used it. Governmental types who enjoyed the bureaucracy of the system, educational types who enjoyed the bureaucracy of the system and hackers who enjoyed the chaos of the system.

Anybody could link to anybody, but this was back in the day when domains were still hard to come by. You couldn't just serve five systems out of your back room. Each server had to be a machine and it had to be a machine connected to the Internet and you could only run one gopher on it at a time.

None of this is =entirely= true. Much of this is, in fact, bullshit.

Theres a lot of things that gopher =could= have been that it wasn't, based on the sheer fact that it existed in isolation. There was very little pride in URLs because very few people actually had URLs. As a user, you'd pretty much find the server or two that you liked and have that written down or in your bookmarks and you'd just sort of cruise from there.

When Veronica came out, that became the gold-standard by which you could judge a gopher site. Veronica was the proto-Google, in many ways. Just a short field where you could enter some terms and it would query the massive databases for files that had been spidered and indexed using some arcane technology.

Veronica finally allowed users to break out from the bonds of the link system and were free to dig up their own information.

There's a bit of a joke in there, too. The idea of Veronica borrowed fairly heavily from archie, a program that searched FTP sites. In actuality there wasn't much difference between the two systems aside from the fact that you could browse gopher and that since there was FTP already, nobody linked files there.

Ultimately, it would be HTML that killed gopher too. The freedom from burdensome publishing bureaucracies made everyone an author. Lists of other sites weren't driven by some uber-powerful gopher admin but some goofball with a text editor and a browser.

So it has always been with HTML, and so it always shall be. There will always be a niche for youngsters who can try to churn out some crap that will be fervently possessed of the idea that it needs something bigger and more, but common access and common publishing says that it will always be kind of dumb. To this day there exist the "authoritative sites", even in the HTML world.

And perhaps as so it shall always be.

HTML was so much better than gopher. Not only could you create documents, but you could make them interactive by having links off the page from pogniantly chosen words. No more evil hierarchies ever needed to be created again. Further, HTML used newfangled URIs -- uniform resource locators. Whatever it was going to be, HTML already supported a way of referencing it. Even if 90% of your existing content was gopher, you could encapsulate it into HTML at no cost.

We enter the fourth age of computing now. HTML is getting old and stale, but HTTP, its transport mechanism is still alive and well. People are getting back to the idea that somehow its not about throbbing buttons and dancing gerbils, but maybe its about the words again.

So, as a treat, gopher -- back in the day when text ruled the world and your process was marked not by a bar or a biblet or a throbber but by an innocent swizzle stick, spinning and pausing like a slot machine just about to make with the goods. The Internet was less of a bargain back then, but maybe, if you were lucky, you could get your back scratched some.