[shareme]

its the gopher argument..

Some of yo may remember an alternative to web called gopher..

It eventually died due to web being free and it not being free.

The form that is more'free'than fb as far as barriers, etc will out-compete fb.. DW, etc have very little to worry about as this changes rapidly and does not stay the same.

[mcantelon]

Gopher was open:

http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1436

It just sucked compared to HTTP.

[pauljburke]

I remember being shown mosaic on the day it went into limited academic beta and (after half an hour or so) saying "It's pretty and all but I can't see how it's ever going to replace gopher"... the person I said it to still won't let me forget that. However, at the time, I had a point. Not always easy to see that with perfect hindsight.

[sireat]

I was the same way when I was shown Mosaic, neat, but what is the point of it? At the time I was perfectly happy with the following text based applications: email,newsgroups,MUDs,ftp.