Artifacts: Stories from the Emotional History of the Internet

·S2 E7

Gopher: The Internet We Almost Had

September 11
8 mins

Episode Description

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Before the Web became the Internet as we know it, there were other ways of finding your way around. Gopher was one of them - a menu-driven system that made it easier to explore information across the early Internet.

For a while, Gopher was a genuine competitor to the World Wide Web. Then the Web became free, Mosaic arrived, and the Internet took a very different path.

In this episode of Artifacts, I look at Gopher, what it was like to explore the early Internet through menus and directories, and what its disappearance tells us about the futures technology leaves behind.

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