6 things about the original internet protocol Gopher, that you probably didn't know...

1. The www was developed by TBL for places like CERN, Stanford, and the CIA, to distribute large centralized troves of data. While

Gopher was developed by long haired 20 somethings at UofM, to be able to run servers on nearly any small computer. This made the

admins at UofM so mad, that one admin stood in the middle of the

room jumping up and down in pumps screaming, "you cant do that!"

"you cant do that!". The UofM wanted the protocol to give them gate keeping control over everything that was moving across the internet, forcing traffic through mainframes. When it didn't, they tried to shut development down.

2. The first gopher servers were named things like Danzig, Mudhoney, and Anthrax

3. According to the developers of Gopher, the real reason www took off over gopher, was the simple fact that while gopher was 100 times better at organizing and making data available, www could serve ads and porn, and gopher couldn't.

4. The last stage of Gopher development was done in secret, hidden

from the UofM administrators, and was released to the internet,

becoming the first viral software release. People loved Gopher so

much that when many of them started calling the U of M asking when new releases were coming, they pretended they had never tried to stop it, and instead tried to charge people for it, which wound up killing the project.

5. The phrase "surf the web" was coined by the two original Gopher

devs, one of whom was a windsurfer.

6. Gopher devs claim that the eratic stream of conciousness hyperlink to hyperlink behavior of the www comes from the eratic thinking and personality of Tim Berners Lee, who naturally programmed how he thought into the protocol.