What’s in a name?
An Internet called Gopher wouldn't smell as sweet🌹
I A bunch of Gophers
While Juliet monologues to Romeo about 99 problems she throws out the famous line:
“What's in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.”
Juliet is lamenting their verboten love, thank you family feud. Romeo is down:
“Henceforth I never will be Romeo.”
It still ends badly for these two. Names matter. 1
What if Roses were called Gophers? Would you smell a bunch of Gophers? 💐
Onto the WWW. Not my last piece The Wacky World of Wearables but THE World Wide Web. Synonymous with the Internets or the Web - the scaffolding that supports nearly 2 Billion websites along with all the rest of tech.
What if the Internet had been named Gopher? That almost happened.
II Berkeley digs Gophers
After I got my MBA from Udub up in Seattle, me and my then fiancé, now wife, threw all our worldly possessions into a moving van and drove up from LA to Oakland. I hadn’t thought of it until I wrote this sentence, but - it's just like we're doing now - starting up together in a new town, just the two of us.
It was a fun time - our first place together. JFran as always got things going, landing a job teaching elementary school down by Fruitvale Station before we even started packing. Once we settled, I got a job keeping the computers going at UC Berkeley's law school. The law profs were a PITA so I moved on pretty quick - but tending to computers at Boalt Hall had two nice perks. The first was I got to swim in the Hearst Gym pool every day. It's not as Roman Empire-esque as the Hearst Castle Pool but still pretty cool. The second perk was I got to play around with Gopher.
Gopher (gopher://) was a distributed file server system that came out a smidge before Tim Berners-Lee came up with the World Wide Web. It was developed by a handful of programmers running the nascent PC Microcomputer center at the University of Minnesota. They named it Gopher after the University’s mascot to minimize waves with the mainframe bigots who wanted to kill it. Gopher spread like wildfire through every computer science department at every university around the world.
I loved it - pick a server to drop in on and cruise through all their goodies downloading and sharing games and files and such. It was text/command line based but because of the potential to connect servers worldwide it grew exponentially. There were Gopher conventions (GopherCons), there were Gopher influencers (nothing more edgy back then than MTV veejay Adam Curry rocking a Gopher T-shirt), the White House put up a Gopher server and went on Good Morning America to announce it. Around a year later when Tim Berners-Lee wanted to get the word out on his new invention the World Wide Web he used - ya you betcha - a Gopher server to announce it.
The University of Minnesota began to realize they had a good thing going. But they got greedy and messed it up with the ultimate betrayal for a burgeoning open-source platform - they started charging licensing fees for Gopher. RIP Gopher, come on down WWW! WWW came with hyperlinks and URLs and then came HTML all of which made for a better web, but timing is everything and after the licensing fiasco Gopher faded fast.2
III Names are Key
I read A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle to my daughter a while ago. It’s about a girl (Meg) who takes off on an interplanetary adventure to rescue her father. They travel through tesseract's or 'wrinkles' in space and time. Ultimately, they find Meg's dad stuck on a planet called Camazotz ruled by a giant disembodied brain (AGI foreshadowing anyone!?) where the inhabitants are nameless minions. Meg is able to escape Camazotz with her family by using naming to assert their identity, individuality and uniqueness which the evil big brain ruler can’t abide.
L'Engle takes down Shakespeare - a Rose by another name is not the same!
IV Your Online Identity
I know you put some thought into the name of your company or non-profit. Maybe it's based on your name? That's cool - you're unique. Maybe it's based on a recognizable trade or product with perhaps a nod towards region or specialty? All good. You need a memorable name - customers will remember it and come back.
Your online identity may not have been something you thought about when you started your business and here's where you may need a bit of a rethink because it's equally important to your brand. Names on the Internet (or the Web or WWW) are called domains. Domain names must be unique. The full name is typically made up of three parts separated by periods like www.wirepine.com. Wirepine uses the most common and original .com top-level domain (TLD). The first part (dub dub dub) signifies it's my website hosted on wirepine.com. Other services like my email (andrew@wirepine.com) are hosted on the same wirepine.com domain.
You want to secure a top level .com name or a .org domain if you are a non-profit. If you hide behind an alternate parent domain like wirepine.wordpress.com or www.wordpress.com/wirepine it's going to be a lot harder to find you - and why have a website if people can't find it! It’s also unprofessional - kinda like you let your kid draw your logo with a crayon on the back of an envelope. Same with your email. Don’t use myamazingbiz@gmail.com. There are some tricks - alternate top-level domains, appending a location to your primary name, etc. that you may need to use to preserve your name and brand integrity online.
V The great domain gold(en gopher) rush
It can get a little nutty securing the right domain name for your business. The .com boom generated so much demand for domain names that the folks in charge (ICANN) realized they needed to add additional TLDs. But they waited too long and so .com remains evermore the de-facto TLD everyone knows. Out of the nearly 2B (!) websites alive today, nearly half use the .com top level domain (TLD) while about 5% use .org. There is a long tail of secondary TLDs after that with .ru (country code for Russia) in 3rd at about 4% and then .net which was one of the OG TLDs with about 3% and so on (there are over 1,000 TLDs now versus the original 7).
I grabbed wirepine.com back in the late 90's and I've held on to it ever since. Initially I used it for my lab at Microsoft and now it's coming into its own, get yours! 💜
VI We’re out of Gopher Holes
But you get it:
Names are important.
The Internet has particular naming conventions and a history that make domain names a limited resource - you gotta claim yours.
Think over your online name and identity; make it professional, make it consistent with the rest of your branding.
I must memorialize what my dad, now working on his 97th year, often told me - without prompting - about Romeo and Juliet:
Romeo and Juliet, twas in the marketplace they met
Romeo had no money to pay the debt
So Romy-owed, while Julie-et
Read about the entire debacle: The rise and fall of the Gopher protocol | MinnPost
A Wrinkle in Time! I read this in... fourth grade? Apparently, that book was first published in 1962. I thought for sure it was pretty new when I was a kid.. and boy did that unlock something in my imagination! Some time around fifth or sixth grade, I wrote something terrible called "Dimensional Journey" - my first sci-fi story, at least as far as I can tell - so I know how much I was thinking about that stuff.
I was in high school during the Gopher Days, but got involved with the web during the first AOL wave. My dad used a modem during the late 80s, but only a handful of times, i think.