Internet Gopher

Bob co-authored the world's first Internet search tool.

 

Internet Gopher RFC 1436

Running a groundbreaking computer service may be fun, but it isn't good for one's college education. In 1990 Bob decided to take a computer help-desk job at the University of Minnesota in order to resume his college education, assisted by the one free class per quarter then offered to employees.

Unfortunately for Bob's scheme, his boss was tired of attending meetings of the campus-wide information system (CWIS) committee. After three years of meetings the committee had a thick document of required functions, but no actual code. Between the April and May meetings in 1991 the help desk team wrote Gopher, a working prototype of a CWIS software using the then-novel "client-server" architecture. The working prototype was VERY well received by this bureaucratic committee: after a lot of shouting they forbade any further development.

The help desk team made their Gopher software available on an FTP site and told some colleagues at other universities about it. Suddenly Gopher servers were erupting all over the Internet, and the help desk team, now the Gopher team, was swept up in responding to software maintenance issues.

Gopher became the first viral app on the Internet because it provided the very first tool that allowed users to search and browse the Internet. Prior to Gopher if you wanted to find something on the Internet you had to know what FTP server it was on beforehand. With Gopher, for the first time you could put a keyword into a search box and get results from all over the world, or browse a directory structure that invisibly spanned many different servers.

From 1991 through 1994 Internet Gopher was how people accessed the Internet. However, Gopher development was never actually part of anyone's job at the help desk. All the extracurricular Gopher support meant that Bob made no money from Gopher development, and got no closer to graduation during his time at the U of Mn. But he had a fun time!