Gopher was the early front-runner for a hypertext system. However it was proprietary (UMN owned if, IIRC) which meant you needed a license to write a client or server that used the protocol. HTTP came along and ate its lunch.
Gopher was the early front-runner for a hypertext system. However it was proprietary (UMN owned if, IIRC) which meant you needed a license to write a client or server that used the protocol. HTTP came along and ate its lunch.
According to Wikipedia, UMN only announced that they would charge for their implementation of Gopher. They said nothing about the protocol and its competing implementations. But this ambiguity made people a bit apprehensive and this proved costly for Gopher at a time when WWW was actively competing with them. TBL and CERN capitalized on this by unamiguously opening the standard, while the Mosaic browser became competitive with Gopher implementations.
Great article about that: https://www.minnpost.com/business/2016/08/rise-and-fall-goph...