Very pleased to announce a new client: I will be writing regular posts for the web site How We Got To Here, which accompanies the TV Series and book of the same name. My first post there is a history of Gopher, an Internet protocol that almost beat the Web.

Gopher, one of the early rivals of Tim Berners-Lee’s World Wide Web for storing and indexing data, was once a legitimate competitor in the struggle toward establishing a de facto standard for using the Internet. But we don’t talk about “digging in Gopherspace” anymore — instead, we “browse the web”.

So, what happened to Gopher? How did this promising protocol become all but obsolete?