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Comment by ryukoposting | Hacker News Reader

Gopher was built for a pre-HAL world, where you couldn't just assume that every user had a graphics card that your software supported - hell, a lot of them might not have graphics at all. In that environment, lack of embedded multimedia was a selling point due to interoperability. If you had a computer and a phone line, you could access Gopher's primeval web. Graphics and sound be damned.

For what it's worth, I have a copy of Netscape on a CD-ROM that came with a copy of PC/Computing sometime around 1994-1995. For those magazine subscribers, it was "free" if you squint a little.

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By the early and especially mid 90s it was incredibly common for the users to have a graphics card. This was the 486 to Pentium era of personal computers. The Mac II line was giving way to the PowerMacs. Graphics cards were commonplace. Being stuck on a text terminal was already old school. Gopher sites were functional, but generally fairly bland. Web sites tended to be a lot more creative (some would say garish) and they were so easy to make that everybody wanted to give them a shot. Animated GIFs were all the rage. Backgrounds and table based layouts were straining the 14.4k modems and 8 MB of RAM machines. It was the wild west. Everybody was trying something different and finding out what worked and what didn't.

> By the early and especially mid 90s it was incredibly common for the users to have a graphics card.

Well yes, if you were lucky enough to have a new entry-level PC in 1994, you'd have a 486SX with just enough VRAM to run WFW at 800x600.

But, at least as late as Obtober 1992, the cheapest new PCs I see in PCMag are PC/AT clones running a 16MHz 286 (it probably had a VGA card, but come on). You could buy a cheap modem, plug it into your AT clone, and yank down some Gopher stuff.

Some folks didn't have a PC, but still had a computer. One of my old machines is a TRS-80 that was being used almost daily as late as 2013.

More than graphics card one needed an an ip address for the graphical web.

There were ways around that, though I never found the experience to be worth the hassle. The Internet Adapter [1] was the one my shell account supported back in the mid-90s.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Internet_Adapter

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