March 21, 2009

Yesterday’s Tomorrow’s World, #2 – Gopher

Gopher was born in 1991 as a means of document sharing. It was popular with universities but was more or less obsolete by 1993, mainly because the world wide web was growing in popularity and did not have some of the restrictions that gopher had.

A second level menu on a gopher server showing a list of folders

A second level menu on a gopher server showing a list of folders

Unlike the world wide web with its HTML pages and mark up, links, pictures and videos, gopher sites were very plain to look at, and unlike the loose linking structure of the web, users had to navigate through a server-defined menu with a strict hierarchy to find a particular document. They used a text based menu for navigation which was defined by the owner of the server who chose what documents to make available. Documents were, in general, plain text although other file types, such as images, could be made available they were NOT embedded in pages as with the world wide web but instead just offered for download as standalone files, in much the same way as modern FTP sites.

Viewing a document in gopher.

Viewing a document in gopher.

Gopher stopped growing around 1993 for a couple of reasons. Firstly the University of Minnesota stated it would be charging licensing fees for its implementation of the gopher server, and secondly the world wide web with its much richer content was gaining in popularity.

There are still a number of gopher servers available in 2009. In fact the number of servers has grown from around 100 in 2007 to about 125 today. Most modern browsers can also navigate gopher services (except IE because it’s crap), so if you want a peek at the past, go to gopher

We’ve come a long way in 2 decades, haven’t we? :)

komakino @ 3:38 pm

March 12, 2009

Ludicrously Long Cartoon Intros

There was something about European cartoons in the 80s and 90s that set them apart from their British cousins: the length of their introductions.

Where in Britain we generally used a sequence just long enough to show the show’s name and give a little jingle, our European friends packed theirs with jolly tunes and a myriad credits. On the first hearing most of these are a novelty: the tunes were usually upbeat and cheerful and the animated sequences gave you an idea of the overall story or what excitement lay ahead, however on subsequent viewings the novelty wore off and you just wanted to watch the show!

I’ve linked to some prime examples:

Dogtanian and the Three Muskahounds is a particularly good example. The tune is irritating, it’s over long and it doesn’t really help explain the story. The lyrics are pretty repetative and the word ‘Muskahound’ is terrible. I remember watching this one about 20 years ago (god I feel old) and even as a 6 year old being frustrated that it wouldn’t just get on with it.

Around the World with Willy Fogg was loosely based on “Around the World in 80 Days” by Jules Verne. Along with many of the same irritations as Dogtanian we now also have bad dubbing where the characters mouths aren’t moving at the same time as the speech (OK, so it was dubbed from Spanish, we’ll give them that) and product placement (see that Iberia ad in there?). However… the lyrics tell the story (mostly) and, for some reason, hearing this one again actually made me shiver a little.

By far my favourite, Mysterious Cities of Gold’s into tells the story, has great lyrics and I could listen to it again and again. It is, however, almost long enough to be a pop song!

Compare that with a typical British offering of the time, The Family Ness (which also has an awesome tune) but weighs in at only 37 seconds:

However, the one thing that all these share, no matter what their country of origin, is that they show without doubt that we had far superior cartoons when we were growing up in the 80s to the rubbish kids of today watch and think is great. Pokemon, anyone?

komakino @ 7:54 pm

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