The latest in my series of case histories of #AdversarialInteroperability and the role it played in keeping tech competitive is the history of Gopher, which I was able to write thanks to the generous assistance of Gopher's co-inventor @lindner@twitter.com.
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Gopher isn't a one-off. Look close at the history of any of our key technologies and you'll find an adversarial interop story. Check out my growing list of case-histories for more.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interoperability
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@doctorow Cory did a great job of capturing the early days of Gopher in his article.
Gopher was the web's immediate predecessor, created by a student-support team at UMN, who burrowed under the mainframe systems' guardians and created a menu-driven interface to campus resources, then the whole internet.
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