So thats what happened to Gopher......

Sir Tim Berners-Lee quoted as saying the web is in its infancy and its impact is still to be felt.

Sir Tim predicted that the web's ability to engender collaboration could one day see the web being used to help manage the planet.

"What's exciting is that people are building new social systems, new systems of review, new systems of governance.

"My hope is that those will produce... new ways of working together effectively and fairly which we can use globally to manage ourselves as a planet."

If previous major tech revolutions are anything to go by, he is right - the "mass internet" - ie the Web - is only 15 years old.

A few years ago I did a study of the development of communications technologies, the "80-20" impact of the more modern ones is a 100 year game, the older ones - like printing - took even longer. In fact in my view the fastest technical development cycle was the move from wooden sailing ship to steel steaming ship - it was a mere 50 years to get from HMS Warrior to HMS Dreadnought. (Which drives another subplot, the role of conflict in technology development, and how VC money now fills that role - anyway, I digress on my digression). In that journey, the amount of experimentation was immense, and - given the fairly tight operating environment envelope - literally sink or swim - it was amazing what was tried out. How about this French beauty, the pre-dreadnought battleship Hoche?

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Anyway, one last digression - if you were around pre-Web, you will recall Archie, Veronica, FTP and....Gopher.

...competing technologies, such as Gopher, which was developed at the University of Minnesota, were also offering a method of using hyperlinks to connect documents across computers on the internet.

"If we had put a price on it (Sir Tim's technology) like the University of Minnesota had done with Gopher then it would not have expanded into what it is now. "

Now that I did not know (that Gopher was a for-sale technology). Does that make me an early day Freetard