One of the hipsters at silverorange emailed me about a year ago: he wondered if I could configure this server to respond to requests for reinvented.net as well as for www.reinvented.net, as his habit was to leave off the www. I was happy to oblige, and this alternative mechanism has been in place ever since.
Not being a hipster myself (but trying hard every day), I am embarassed to admit that not only do I continue to call up this website using the www, but I almost always type the URL as http://ruk.ca/, even though no browser I know of has actually required this for as long as anyone can remember.
Back at the dawn of time, you couldn’t assume the http:// because you might just as well be connecting to a Gopher server with your browser, which required gopher://. My fingers got trained under that regime, and I’ve not yet been unable to untrain them.
I’ve probably wasted years of my life typing http://, and dented my carpal tunnels an extra 23% while I was at it.
Here’s a pointer to a gopher server (at Trent University) — if you can click through, then your browser still supports Gopher, which is pretty amazing, as it isn’t in common use, and hasn’t been for many years.
Funny to think that back at Access 1994 in St. John’s we were all busy debating whether Gopher or the World Wide Web would emerge as the dominant medium. I think one of the sessions at the conference was a demo of a 3D Gopher Server. Those were the days.
At one point, Hyper-G was also going to be the next generation of the web. A decade later and the web is still rooted in a lot of its original plumbing. I wonder if there’s ever been a better testimony to the success of simplicity and instant gratification than the web, and even to the value of achieving some elegance in a network protocol. Gopher was probably doomed when Mosaic appeared, a computer application with big buttons on the top that people could actually use on first try. I don’t even notice Peter Mansbridge grimacing on saying “http” when he gives out web addresses anymore, though even the media is starting to drop the protocol specification that was such a big deal in 1993/1994. Still, I also type "http" every time to the great amusement of my children.
POSTED JUL 4, 2003 AT 10:42 AST BY art (arhyno@uwindsor.ca)
That is the interesting thing about "plumbing" systems - the first to the post at the early stages always defines what follows. The Y2K "scare" was based on a bunch of guys in the late 40's deciding to use 2 digits for the year as there was no way in their minds that the system would still be in place over 50 years later.
POSTED JUL 4, 2003 AT 11:03 AST BY ALAN
You never did update the government’s website to work with gov.pe.ca though...
POSTED JUL 4, 2003 AT 12:34 AST BY Isaac (isaac@silverorange.com)
MSIE6/Win can't resolve the TrentU gopher URL. Opera7/Win requires that gopher URLs be requested through a proxy server (huh?). Firebird/Win browses straight through to the directory without complaint.
The only document on the TrentU server reads as follows:
About Trent's Gopher Service
============================
Trent University is now using the Web.
Please visit us at;
http://www.trentu.ca
Our Gopher Service is no longer being maintained
and will be phased out in the near future.
Computing Services Dept.
July 2000
POSTED JUL 4, 2003 AT 13:05 AST BY LOU QUILLIO
Gopher was easier for content managers -- just dump files in a directory structure -- but it didn't have the sizzle that Mosaic had. Maybe it was too easy!
POSTED JUL 4, 2003 AT 15:16 AST BY PETER RUKAVINA