It seems to me that Gopher just failed to keep up with the times. Embedding images into the page was a killer feature for HTML and Gopher was still doggedly text based because they were still supporting the VT100 users that had been the core userbase. Plus the web went on to support text formatting, tables, and even eventually layout.
The article isn't entirely correct about the early web being completely free. Netscape was not free software, at least on paper. In practice they didn't try to stop people from spreading it far and wide and I think the sales were somewhat modest despite being the core element of a technological revolution. Also, I guess NCSA Mosiac was technically around, but it lacked enough features to make it a second class citizen compared to Netscape Navigator.
Gopher was built for a pre-HAL world, where you couldn't just assume that every user had a graphics card that your software supported - hell, a lot of them might not have graphics at all. In that environment, lack of embedded multimedia was a selling point due to interoperability. If you had a computer and a phone line, you could access Gopher's primeval web. Graphics and sound be damned.
For what it's worth, I have a copy of Netscape on a CD-ROM that came with a copy of PC/Computing sometime around 1994-1995. For those magazine subscribers, it was "free" if you squint a little.
By the early and especially mid 90s it was incredibly common for the users to have a graphics card. This was the 486 to Pentium era of personal computers. The Mac II line was giving way to the PowerMacs. Graphics cards were commonplace. Being stuck on a text terminal was already old school. Gopher sites were functional, but generally fairly bland. Web sites tended to be a lot more creative (some would say garish) and they were so easy to make that everybody wanted to give them a shot. Animated GIFs were all the rage. Backgrounds and table based layouts were straining the 14.4k modems and 8 MB of RAM machines. It was the wild west. Everybody was trying something different and finding out what worked and what didn't.
> By the early and especially mid 90s it was incredibly common for the users to have a graphics card.
Well yes, if you were lucky enough to have a new entry-level PC in 1994, you'd have a 486SX with just enough VRAM to run WFW at 800x600.
But, at least as late as Obtober 1992, the cheapest new PCs I see in PCMag are PC/AT clones running a 16MHz 286 (it probably had a VGA card, but come on). You could buy a cheap modem, plug it into your AT clone, and yank down some Gopher stuff.
Some folks didn't have a PC, but still had a computer. One of my old machines is a TRS-80 that was being used almost daily as late as 2013.
There were ways around that, though I never found the experience to be worth the hassle. The Internet Adapter [1] was the one my shell account supported back in the mid-90s.
Gopher was a much more highly structured format. Even if they'd included inline images, they didn't really have a day 0 formatting or layout language that allowed for nesting. There were other locked in choices too, like using a 8 bit value for file type.
> Embedding images into the page was a killer feature for HTML
I'd disagree slightly. Users did not have the high bandwidth always on connections then that they do now. Images were nice but were also avoided as they made pages "slow". The main reason lightboxes and other clickable thumbnails came into existence.
> was still doggedly text based because they were still supporting the VT100 users
I used lynx and links for a very long time. What made me switch was the prevalence and ultimate utility of JavaScript. It turned simple pages that were best consumed after being fully downloaded into complete progressive applications.
Users did not have the high bandwidth always on connections then that they do now
users at universities did. i do remember this time as a student, early websites with small but colorful pictures and formatted text were clearly more appealing than gopher.
> Images were nice but were also avoided as they made pages "slow". The main reason lightboxes and other clickable thumbnails came into existence.
I first used the web in 1995 and websites definitely used inline images. The images were mostly small GIF images but they were definitely there. Every web authoring guide implored you to set explicit sizes on img tags so browsers wouldn't have to do a full repaint as images loaded.
Modems weren't that slow in the mid-90s, 14.4k modems were common and 28.8k modems were starting to be the default OEM option.
The article isn't entirely correct about the early web being completely free. Netscape was not free software, at least on paper. In practice they didn't try to stop people from spreading it far and wide and I think the sales were somewhat modest despite being the core element of a technological revolution. Also, I guess NCSA Mosiac was technically around, but it lacked enough features to make it a second class citizen compared to Netscape Navigator.