Gopherspace revisited

Cal Lee’s discussion of the rise and fall of Gopher, and his refutation of simplistic explanations for the dominance of HTTP, is a good read. But it’s more than a paragraph long and hasn’t any pictures, so it won’t appeal to the average web denizen.

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.

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