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An excerpt from #IETF #RFC1436 specification
( https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc1436 )
“The first character of each line in a [ #Gopher ] server-supplied directory listing indicates whether the item is a file (character '0'), a directory (character '1'), or a search (character '7'). This is the base set of item types in the Gopher protocol. It is desirable for clients to be able to use different services and speak different protocols […] as needs dictate […]”
@reiver @alcinnz this comparison of Gopher from 1999 is worth reading: https://www.ics.uci.edu/~rohit/IEEE-L7-http-gopher.html
The article doesn't mention something that I think is important to understand how the #WorldWideWeb got popular —
Once the Web supported the <img> tag — it was easy to view porn.
A lot easier than #FTP'ing images, and then trying to find some external program with the right codec to view the image you downloaded.
Web Browsers let you view the image in the same app.
Many don't seem to like acknowledging this, but — porn drove a lot of things on the Internet and on the Web.
@reiver @alcinnz That's a very interesting point, but I don't remember seeing much porn on the WWW in 1994, 1995, and 1996, when Gopher was still viable. Lots on Usenet, but none on the WWW, because (in the WWW and Gopher but not Usenet) the costs of the bandwidth were paid by the speaker rather than the listener, and porn would use rapidly a lot of bandwidth.
(So, predictably, the WWW is now full of speech that benefits the speaker rather than the listener.)
Even when viewing things that weren't images, WWW browsers were easier because they would use your `.mailcap` to launch `mpeg_play_motif` or whatever. There was no Gopher type code for MPEG, but there was a MIME type.
@radehi @alcinnz
I think I had a different experience than you.
Assuming I'm not misremembering — I do remember porn on the #WorldWideWeb in 1995 & 1996.
(It was one of the early things I was shown by those who introduced me to the Web way back then.)
Although not sure about 1994.
But I also remember FTP porn too before that.
.