Re: itype 3 as generic status Re: To evolve or not to evolve

On Fri, Oct 28, 2022 at 7:59 AM James Tomasino <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> On Fri, 2022-10-28 at 09:32 +0200, Mateusz Viste wrote:
> > BTW I'd be curious to know when exactly "i" became a thing... Is
> > there any archeological evidence about that?
>
> Oh, I did some research into this a few years ago. Now lets see if I
> remember the details...
>
> I found mention of type "i" in wide usage within a year of the initial
> gopher announcement. If memory serves it started being used by one
> server and quickly adopted.

I wrote a post about this a while ago [0]. The i type was added by
University of Iowa as part of the "Panda" system (their fork of
gopher) in '92. It was presented later that year at gophercon '92
[1][2].

"The one Panda feature which seemed to gain everyone's approval was
the ability to put explanatory text at the top and/or bottom of the
screen rather than in an "About" file."

And it even got a shoutout from Tim Berners Lee on the first WWW site [3].

"A Gopher menu is a dry list of items. Each line has 80 characters in
which to describe an option. In practice, to communicate with the
reader, one needs the full power of text formatting in a number of
styles. A plain list turns out to be relatively infrequently used when
the author or the program generating the document has a choice. Note
that the "Panda" project adds some plain text to Gopher menus, but
this is only a small step toward the flexible blending of links and
text which is hypertext."

[0] gemini://mozz.us/journal/2021-05-27.gmi
[1] https://lists.h-net.org/cgi-bin/logbrowse.pl?trx=vx&list=edtech&month=9205&week=&msg=SfcDLi9jGSSIkJsnxaCcbg&user=&pw=
[2] https://lists.h-net.org/cgi-bin/logbrowse.pl?trx=vx&list=edtech&month=9209&week=&msg=uKK7SMiFP/r6plGomtk47A
[3] http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/FAQ/WAISandGopher.html