When I got my first shell account in 1993 it was as a student of the University of Minnesota, and I remember that the first time you logged in it didn't dump yo

When I got my first shell account in 1993 it was as a student of the University of Minnesota, and I remember that the first time you logged in it didn't dump you directly into tcsh or whatever, there was an easy shell that let you navigate by number. I recall vividly that both Gopher and the World Wide Web were on this list (previously I only had had experience with Usenet and FTP). Initially it seemed like Gopher had all the things, and the WWW was some weird novelty. Of course within a year I had seen Mosaic running, and building web pages became a career long obsession for me. It's hard for me to gauge the politics (I only turned 15 in 1993), but at least from where I sat, the multimedia document with embedded hyperlinks was the secret sauce. It was the same thing that had gotten me obsessed with HyperCard back in the day. The web just felt like this creative playground with unlimited untapped potential, and Gopher felt sort of bureaucratic (again, maybe just from where I sat at the U of M). Ironic that now Gopher is maintained as a labor of love by hobbyists.