I’m noticing a bunch of people noting that it’s the Web’s fifteenth birthday today, or yesterday, or tomorrow, depending on your timezone of choice. Now fifteen net years is something like 150 years in old money, and at this point, I trip over (in Kottke’s back pages) a link to a living breathing fossil world and a quick summary of Gopherish artefacts lying in dusty corners of the interweb.
Gather the kids around the screen, and see how unimpressed they cannot fail to be, by the text-only-tastic, strictly heirarchical store-and-forward document system, which was pretty much the last big-ish thing to hit the internet, before the Web came along and changed everything. It’s quite astonishing that Gopher servers are still running out there, approximately fifteen years after it was rendered obsolete – almost as astonishing as the fact that of all the tools you’re likely to have at your disposal, only a recent model Firefox is likely to do the business. They put the Gopher protocol into Firefox!?! Why?