I’m old enough to have used gopher on vt100 terminals as an undergrad in college to try and do some ‘work’. And when http/www arrived, it didn’t take long to switch to a better mousetrap. And this wasn’t just because you could now render a gif in NCSA Mosaic on indigo workstation. Everything was just better in this new http world.
Let’s fast forward to today, yes, we’ve gone overboard all over, but then again, Gopher [i think] doesn’t come standard with TLS, it hasn’t gone through the evolution that http[s] has that makes it a robust and scalable backbone it is today.
What I’m trying to say is that we should not casually float around pipe dreams about switching to ancient tech that wasn’t that good to begin with. Yes, electric cars were a thing already in early 1900s, and we maybe took a wrong turn with combustion engine, but with Gopher, I think we should let the sleeping dogs lie, and focus on improving next version of QUIC, or even inventing something entirely new that would address many of the concerns in the article without sacrificing years of innovation since we abandoned Gopher. Heck, this new thing might as well run on TCP/70, never mind UDP appears to be the thing now[0].
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP/3
Let’s fast forward to today, yes, we’ve gone overboard all over, but then again, Gopher [i think] doesn’t come standard with TLS, it hasn’t gone through the evolution that http[s] has that makes it a robust and scalable backbone it is today.
What I’m trying to say is that we should not casually float around pipe dreams about switching to ancient tech that wasn’t that good to begin with. Yes, electric cars were a thing already in early 1900s, and we maybe took a wrong turn with combustion engine, but with Gopher, I think we should let the sleeping dogs lie, and focus on improving next version of QUIC, or even inventing something entirely new that would address many of the concerns in the article without sacrificing years of innovation since we abandoned Gopher. Heck, this new thing might as well run on TCP/70, never mind UDP appears to be the thing now[0].
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP/3