Only one byte for the filetype is comically shortsighted. Even HFS from 1985 had 4 byte codes. The lack of Unicode is understandable given the era, but the la

Only one byte for the filetype is comically shortsighted. Even HFS from 1985 had 4 byte codes. The lack of Unicode is understandable given the era, but the lack of support for any other encoding is another "this is a toy system" red flag. Encryption and compression are the kind of thing that get layered on later as the protocol matures, leaving them out of the first implementation is not an issue. I'm sure if Gopher had stuck around there would have been a version 2.0 of the spec that addressed these issues, although that one byte filetype would make for some fun backwards compatibility hacks. The bigger issue is "what compelling reason would you have to use Gopher instead of HTTP"? What does it do better? Small reductions in overhead aren't generally worth the tradeoff. On a side note I remember one of the earliest search engines for Gopher was named VERONICA, for Very Easy Rodent Oriented Net-wide Index to Computer Archives, a glorious backronym that came about because they wanted to riff on the FTP search engine being named ARCHIE.