Did You Know?

Internet 1.0: Before the World Wide Web there was Gopher

Before his work on Gopher, Mark McCahill led a University team in the development of POPmail -- one of the first popular Internet e-mail clients.

Today, even schoolkids use the Internet to study and learn about the world.

But 20 years ago, the Internet was a jumble of incompatible networks and closed systems so confusing that only computer experts could use it.

A system called Gopher, created in 1991 by a University of Minnesota team led by programmer Mark McCahill, was a key step in turning that matrix of dead end roads into today's information superhighway.

Gopher was the Internet's first widely used search-and-retrieval system. It was the standard tool of online research in the early- to mid-1990s, like the World Wide Web is today. Gopher opened up the Internet and made it much easier for computer users -- anywhere in the world -- to find information online and make their own articles, images and data available to others.

Gopher was initially created just for the University of Minnesota. Like most other universities, the U maintains huge amounts of information, from student records to scholarly research. In the late 1980s, a lot of this information was converted to digital format. Gopher was designed to make that information accessible campus-wide via any computer terminal.

Croquet Is Coming

Mark McCahill, the creator of Gopher and director of the University Technology Development Center, is changing the online world again with Croquet, which could become the classroom of the future. Croquet is a multi-user, 3D software environment that will enable students and instructors to create and collaborate in "virtual reality".

Because Gopher was so inexpensive and user-friendly, it quickly caught on well beyond Minnesota. By installing a Gopher server and software, any institution was able to plug into the fast-growing network of computers, which could speak to each other. In April 1993, there were 460 registered Gopher servers. By December of that year, there were nearly 5,000.

If today's Web is free-form jazz, Gopher was carefully arranged classical music. It used text-based menus rather than hyperlinks. It organized information into a hierarchical system of folders and files particularly well suited for searching large databases. That's one reason it's still used today by big organizations like the Smithsonian Institution and the U.S. government.

The most lasting impact of Gopher is at your fingertips right now -- any person, not just "experts," can easily access and add to the wealth of knowledge on the Internet.

Further reading

Croquet