The Scrapyard of the Internet

I found a really interesting article from the BBC discussing a little history about the world wide web that not a lot of people know about.

This article by Mark Ward talks a little about two things that weren't mentioned in the video we watched in class: Usenet and Gopher. Usenet was another way for people to find documents over the Internet other than using the WWW.

Gopher was created by the University of Minnesota (mascot is the Golden Gophers) and released in 1991 and was actually more frequently used than the WWW early on. The downfall for Gopher ultimately was in 1993 when the Univ. of Minn. decided to start charging money for Gopher.

It's amazing to think that if someone decided not to try to turn an immediate profit on Gopher, the entire Internet as we know it could be drastically different.