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Comment by protomyth | Hacker News Reader

"Eventually, though, the U did want some money — for itself. At GopherCon ’93, Yen announced that for-profit Gopher users would need to pay the U a licensing fee: hundreds or thousands of dollars, depending on the size and nature of their business."

I wonder how many futures have been destroyed from the desire to profit off the eating of the seeds instead of fruit?

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The University of Minnesota office of commercialization of technology does this habitually, asking for far too much money from startup entrepreneurs. Many of the academians have no idea how business works, and don't care. 90% of their success has come from one patent. So from the standpoint of this one institution, you could actually answer that question by auditing their performance over the past.

On the other hand, it is a publicly funded institution, funded by taxes and student fees. So one has to also ask if it would be fair for a small few having little to do with the University should be able to profit off of investments made by public dollars and overly high student debt.

This is so true. You have to remember that finances were really tight at this time. The University budget was getting cut left and right throughout the history of Gopher's evolution. At one point there were plans to outsource everyone to the Minnesota Supercomputer Institute.

Of course in hindsight obtaining grants or forming a partnership with a non-profit org or an academic department might have been a better choice, especially for all the professional services requests.

edit: Also you have to remember that computing was a LOT more expensive then. I have old quotes for SparcStations and RS/6000s that were in the $20-40k range, even with an educational discount.. The Mac IIci's were not cheap either ~$5k when loaded up with RAM.

> The University budget was getting cut left and right throughout the history of Gopher's evolution.

Was it actually getting cut or were they not getting the increase they wanted? I lived in MN off and on since the 90's and it seems like they call a "cut" every time they don't get the increase they want.

> edit: Also you have to remember that computing was a LOT more expensive then. I have old quotes for SparcStations and RS/6000s that were in the $20-40k range, even with an educational discount.. The Mac IIci's were not cheap either ~$5k when loaded up with RAM.

Looking back, when people see the price of the NeXT cube and freak out, they forget how much a Mac IIfx was. Its amazing the era had basically expensive computers and machines like the Sinclair and Commodores in the very low end.

Regarding cuts, yes. We had to do with less year-over-year. From Hasselmo's 1991 State of the U address:

> """We lost at least $25 million to inflation, and $16 million through a base cut this year. In addition to a potential $25 million loss to inflation next year again, the Governor's vetoes of IT and systemwide special appropriations cut another $23 million in funding -- for which we are aggressively seeking full restoration."""

The mainframe teams had a harder time of things. For Microcomputers we were lucky - our hardware costs decreased and we had a deal with the University Bookstore to support their computer hardware sales.

That stuff was still expensive. Here's some educational pricing for a workstation with substantial education discount in 1994.

                                        list          discount   
  IBM model 25T                         $8495         $5400.00
         80Mhz upgrade                  $1500         $ 953.50
         64MB upgrade                   $             $2912.00
         2GB disk upgrade               $             $1463.00
                                                       -------
                                                      10728.50

But, HoneyCrisp apples are so good!

In hindsight it was a stupid limiting move. Yes, we did get the Gopher T-shirt on MTV and a number of companies did end up paying. I was even loaned out for a few weeks to Schlumberger to assist with putting Gopher servers on Oil Platforms.

But it was optimizing for a local maxima. The damage was done, the community was broken.

During the first dot com boom, an MIT spin-off company tried to sell a new server side language. It looked something like Lisp with curly braces. I don't remember the name of the company or language. I just remember that they expected customers to pay per byte served (from the customers' own web servers)!

Curly braces? The language was called 'Curl'. ;-)

http://www.curl.com

Thanks! I was so close. :)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curl_(programming_language)

I'm sure UIUC could chime in on that w/Mosaic.

Incidentally, when I matriculated at UIUC in 1997, most of the computer-lab Macs ran NCSA Mosaic. (The PCs and UNIX machines had Netscape.) I remember receiving some materials on internet resources when I got to the dorms. At the time, many freshmen required instructions on how to use the internet. These materials had been prepared a few years earlier and still included references to Gopher.

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