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We should not let the open web die a quiet death
(www.wired.com)
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this post was submitted on 14 Jul 2023
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The open Internet was built by grad students and weirdo engineers, in a process involving frequent conflict. HTTP beat Gopher in part because Gopher was owned by a university that wanted to charge money for it. The Internet interprets bullshit that some nerd doesn't like as system damage and routes around it, eventually.
Also: Today's major tech companies succeeded (in part) by being tolerant enough to harness the engineering efforts of queer, trans, furry, fanfic-writing, burner, psychonaut geeks. IBM didn't let you wear cat ears to the office, but Google did. Google is now worth 10x as much money as IBM.
I was not aware of any of this... I'll have to read up on it as it sounds fascinating. So many people are unaware of how things came to be.
Gopher is like very simple and cool. Something similar to Telnet but it's own thing. It's free nowadays btw but ofc nobody uses it.
Gopher and telnet are not the same sort of thing.
Gopher is like the Web. Telnet is like SSH.
Gopher lets you fetch documents and directories off of remote servers that can link to each other. Telnet lets you connect to a remote server as if you had a terminal on that computer.