I miss the old Internet
There is quite a bit of talk about the “Web 2.0″ and the “next generation of internet services” floating around lately, especially among the popular media. All this talk has, for whatever reason, made me nostalgic for internet technology of yesteryear. Many of these old technologies were simple, effective, and certainly useful today.
For example, I think that the old Gopher protocol died an early death. For those who never played around with a university computer connected to the Internet back in the late 80′s or early 90′s, gopher was a menu driven internet application. While it was sometimes difficult to find things, gopher had the advantage of being efficient, especially when modem speeds were measured in bits per second (and there weren’t many bits per second). Gopher was also nice in that it worked well for small viewing displays. Today, a gopher-like technology would be ideal for cellular phones, since they suffer from both low data bandwidth and limit viewing capability.
Another technology that seems to have fallen by the wayside is Usenet. Long before the word “blog” was being abused by the media, Usenet was the place to go for online collaboration. It was also the original file sharing system, and today it largely serves the same function. While Usenet technically is in use today, it has been all but eliminated by more interactive, feature-rich, and web-driven applications. Usenet had quite a culture surrounding it, and the purists claim web-driven forms of Usenet, such as Google Groups, as having killed the system. Despite all of this, Usenet does have a very strong, albeit small, following, mostly among old techies and younger geeks.
The beauty of these and other internet technologies is their simplicity. The modern internet seems to be moving to a completely web-based system. While there are independent protocols for many applications, it is possible to run almost any user-application in a web-based interface. While this does lead to great convenience, it does add to the complexity. And while websites have gotten much more attractive and approachable (take my site), the element of content is often overlooked (again, take my site). Not having a flashy patina was an advantage, since the only thing to look at was the content of the medium.
The one oddity in the evolution of internet technology is email. Email, for whatever reason, has survived longer than any other internet application. It does represent the simplest use and purpose of the internet: communication. I’m not sure why it is that email survived and other internet technologies, such as gopher, did not.
The internet will continue to evolve, but I’m not sure what will happen. It is easy to say that the web will continue to dominate the application of the internet, but I think that might be a bit shortsighted. After all, recent technologies like Bittorrent have become quite successful. The key to innovation is, however, freedom to innovate. Web browsers as we know them today came from the University of Illinois (aside: the funding for this project came from a bill sponsored by Senator Al Gore, ultimately leading to the “invented the internet” misquote). Gopher and Usenet, too, were graduate school projects. Modern technologies, Bittorrent and RSS, are pet projects. These projects represent the ultimate power of the internet: as a medium for innovation. The developers of these applications found a use for the internet, and others found it to be fun or useful. We cannot limit what the internet can do, and we should not try to put restrictions on its usage, for fear of losing out on future innovation.
Rest in peace, gopher. You have served us well, but now it is time to move on. Perhaps we can learn from you and your success.
UPDATE (5 Aug 06): The BBC has posted a nice article about Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s original code for the web. The article also has a nice discussion about the state of internet technology in 1991.
