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Comment by dmd | Hacker News Reader

> “I still remember a woman in pumps jumping up and down and shouting, ‘You can’t do that!’ ”

> Among the team's offenses: Gopher didn’t use a mainframe computer and its server-client setup empowered anyone with a PC, not a central authority.

File this under "straw-man responses that happened in their feverish anti-establishment imaginations."

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Not sure what dmd is implying here. But I will say that the committee was looking at using either X.500 or CSO protocols instead. Thus it would rely on a centralized authority and a publishing model that would not allow for individuals to run their own servers.

Also remember that this was the old internet where we didn't have NAT or really any firewalling. Most of the University of Minnesota's class B was open to the world at the time. In fact I used to send email directly to my workstation instead of the central mail host to avoid delays..

Actually, the article very accurately describes exactly how the University of Minnesota works with surprisingly vivid realism. It's likely that the department was receiving significant funding from companies asking it to do mainframe research of some kind. Working on what were considered "toys," at the time probably would have looked extremely bad.

Now does this mean that Gopher would have, "won out," over the WWW? No. But the description holds.

Source? Context? Authority even?

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