Ah, here’s a surprise. I think maybe 0.5% of my friends here will have ANY idea what Gopher is, but Gopher predated the WWW by a couple of years. The developers of the WWW and the clients incorporated a lot of Gopher ideas into theirs, and because the whole h t t p space was EMPTY at first, they leveraged Gopher to fill it up until such time that it took on a life of its own. Gopher isn’t even supported in most major browsers, although extensions exist for most/all of them.. and surprisingly it continues to have an active userbase of this “alternate protocol”. I’m amazed that 25 years later it’s still going and gaining enthusiasts. It’s likely because it’s very easy from a technological point of view to run a gopher server: it’s files and directories and it’s unbelievably fast. Of course it’s not as flexible as the web which is why it was overtaken but still, I’m glad to see it’s still being used even in 2016.

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