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Gopher was built for a pre-HAL world, where you couldn't just assume that every user had a graphics card that your software supported - hell, a lot of them migh

Gopher was built for a pre-HAL world, where you couldn't just assume that every user had a graphics card that your software supported - hell, a lot of them might not have graphics at all. In that environment, lack of embedded multimedia was a selling point due to interoperability. If you had a computer and a phone line, you could access Gopher's primeval web. Graphics and sound be damned. For what it's worth, I have a copy of Netscape on a CD-ROM that came with a copy of PC/Computing sometime around 1994-1995. For those magazine subscribers, it was "free" if you squint a little.

detourdog 2y ago
More than graphics card one needed an an ip address for the graphical web.
- kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 2y ago
  There were ways around that, though I never found the experience to be worth the hassle. The Internet Adapter [1] was the one my shell account supported back in the mid-90s. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Internet_Adapter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Internet_Adapter
jandrese 2y ago
By the early and especially mid 90s it was incredibly common for the users to have a graphics card. This was the 486 to Pentium era of personal computers. The Mac II line was giving way to the PowerMacs. Graphics cards were commonplace. Being stuck on a text terminal was already old school. Gopher sites were functional, but generally fairly bland. Web sites tended to be a lot more creative (some would say garish) and they were so easy to make that everybody wanted to give them a shot. Animated GIFs were all the rage. Backgrounds and table based layouts were straining the 14.4k modems and 8 MB of RAM machines. It was the wild west. Everybody was trying something different and finding out what worked and what didn't.
- ryukoposting 2y ago
  > By the early and especially mid 90s it was incredibly common for the users to have a graphics card. Well yes, if you were lucky enough to have a new entry-level PC in 1994, you'd have a 486SX with just enough VRAM to run WFW at 800x600. But, at least as late as Obtober 1992, the cheapest new PCs I see in PCMag are PC/AT clones running a 16MHz 286 (it probably had a VGA card, but come on). You could buy a cheap modem, plug it into your AT clone, and yank down some Gopher stuff. Some folks didn't have a PC, but still had a computer. One of my old machines is a TRS-80 that was being used almost daily as late as 2013.

detourdog 2y ago

More than graphics card one needed an an ip address for the graphical web.

kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 2y ago
There were ways around that, though I never found the experience to be worth the hassle. The Internet Adapter [1] was the one my shell account supported back in the mid-90s. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Internet_Adapter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Internet_Adapter

jandrese 2y ago

By the early and especially mid 90s it was incredibly common for the users to have a graphics card. This was the 486 to Pentium era of personal computers. The Mac II line was giving way to the PowerMacs. Graphics cards were commonplace. Being stuck on a text terminal was already old school. Gopher sites were functional, but generally fairly bland. Web sites tended to be a lot more creative (some would say garish) and they were so easy to make that everybody wanted to give them a shot. Animated GIFs were all the rage. Backgrounds and table based layouts were straining the 14.4k modems and 8 MB of RAM machines. It was the wild west. Everybody was trying something different and finding out what worked and what didn't.

ryukoposting 2y ago
> By the early and especially mid 90s it was incredibly common for the users to have a graphics card. Well yes, if you were lucky enough to have a new entry-level PC in 1994, you'd have a 486SX with just enough VRAM to run WFW at 800x600. But, at least as late as Obtober 1992, the cheapest new PCs I see in PCMag are PC/AT clones running a 16MHz 286 (it probably had a VGA card, but come on). You could buy a cheap modem, plug it into your AT clone, and yank down some Gopher stuff. Some folks didn't have a PC, but still had a computer. One of my old machines is a TRS-80 that was being used almost daily as late as 2013.