One of the saddest things about the modern Internet is how little hypertext is used. As an example, I would have expected, 'Mark McCahill' to link to his personal or academic site[0], 'San Diego' to link to the city government's site[1], 'Hyatt Islandia' to link to that hotel's site [2] (perhaps with a note that its name has changed), and 'Mission Bay' to link to an appropriate page [3] — and that's in the first paragraph alone.
It's also interesting how those slides from 1992 look current as of 2016: flat, bullet-pointed, sans-serif font.
> But the internet was not yet open for business. It had been built on dot-mil and dot-edu, on public funds. Programmers shared source code; if you needed something, someone gave it to you. A dot-com address was considered crass. It was “as though all of TV was PBS,” Lindner says. “No commercials.”
Those really were the days. I remember the Canter & Siegel spam, and how appalled we all were to see it. The Internet then was more genteel. Honestly, I wish it were still non-commercial: available to be used by companies (as it was even in the 90s), but not as an advertising medium.
> 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. Many users felt betrayed. In the open-source computing spirit of the day, they had contributed code to Gopher, helping the team keep up with the times. Now they were being asked to pony up.
As much as it's become fashionable to group-hate esr the last decade or so, I think that it's important to recognise his major contribution: persuading folks the free software (under a different name) can be good for business. Imagine if the university had kept Gopher as GPLed software, rather than demanding money from its users.
> At its peak, the Mother Gopher consisted of 10 Apple IIci computers. But when it was finally euthanized, who knows what shape it was in. There was no ceremony. Nothing was carted off to a museum. Gopherspace simply became emptier, and the world without the Web became harder to imagine.
That's definitely sad. We need to do a better job of honouring our history and marking important events. Even in the late 90s or early 2000s, folks ought to have recognised the historic import of gopher.
[0] https://fds.duke.edu/db/aas/ISIS/faculty/mark.mccahill
[2] http://missionbay.regency.hyatt.com/en/hotel/home.html
[3] https://www.sandiego.gov/park-and-recreation/parks/regional/...