One thing I never see in these analyses is ease of setting up a server. Back when I was in college and got my first computer, I could install a simple web serv

One thing I never see in these analyses is ease of setting up a server. Back when I was in college and got my first computer, I could install a simple web server, drop any file in its folder, and view that file in my web browser. If it was HTML, and I got the HTML wrong, it would still display most of the page. Gopher wasn't like that at all. I downloaded the Gopher server and ran it. Then I put a file in its folder, and it didn't show up. You had to (IIRC) write a special index file to tell it how to serve each file. If you didn't get it perfectly right, it wouldn't show up at all. And of course the error messages and documentation were somewhere between "terrible" and "missing". I wanted Gopher to succeed, because I liked the simple, regular organization of information, rather than the crazy anything-goes world of the World Wide Web. I just couldn't figure out how to get it to work.