Paul here from the Superfund Squad, where we're getting rid of the infrastructure you love to hate and paying off unfunded mandates with technical debt. And digging up the History of Google's Social Efforts in the attached collection.

I've been cranking at this social thing for almost 7 years at Google on Google+ and a long time before that at places Six Apart (home of Typepad and Livejournal), hi5 and LinkedIn. I did a lot of work on OpenSocial and other standards back then which is a big reason I'm here today.

Oh and this enterprise thing isn't my first rodeo. Way back at Critical Path we provided hosted email, calendar and tasks for Italian Telecoms, Major Universities *and* the Kiss Army. And at Red Hat we sold shrink wrap and services to all sales channels.

But I'm most proud of the work I did at the UN on telecom standards, relief efforts and publishing the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 500 languages. (And the site is still standing to this day!)

http://www.ohchr.org/EN/UDHR/Pages/SearchByLang.aspx

And finally before that was the Internet Gopher.. Me, with Heavy Metal hair:

https://www.minnpost.com/business/2016/08/rise-and-fall-gopher-protocol

Beyond all this tech I enjoy life in Oakland with my fabulous wife Julie and our Great Pyrenees Gus. You'll find us exploring the parks of the East Bay, checking out obscure music or cruising the rapidly gentrifying Valencia street in the Mission. I'm also heavily interested in building software and systems that last the long term. I'm a member of the Long Now (https://longnow.org) and I have a 20% project called Digital Vellum (http://go/digitalvellum)

Happy to be here with y'all and looking forward to our next adventures!

#googplus

#googplus

For the record Gopher used port 150 for some time until we got a warning from Joyce that we had to change it.

Registering MIME types was also easy:

https://www.iana.org/assignments/media-types/application/msw...

Regarding cuts, yes. We had to do with less year-over-year. From Hasselmo's 1991 State of the U address:

> """We lost at least 5 million to inflation, and 6 million through a base cut this year. In addition to a potential 5 million loss to inflation next year again, the Governor's vetoes of IT and systemwide special appropriations cut another 3 million in funding -- for which we are aggressively seeking full restoration."""

The mainframe teams had a harder time of things. For Microcomputers we were lucky - our hardware costs decreased and we had a deal with the University Bookstore to support their computer hardware sales.

That stuff was still expensive. Here's some educational pricing for a workstation with substantial education discount in 1994.

                                        list          discount   
  IBM model 25T                         495         400.00
         80Mhz upgrade                  500         $ 953.50
         64MB upgrade                   $             912.00
         2GB disk upgrade               $             463.00
                                                       -------
                                                      10728.50

We liked Hyper-G because it had a bi-directional link model and the Harmony browser was able to render VRML.

Maybe 2016 will be the year VR takes off (again)

This is so true. You have to remember that finances were really tight at this time. The University budget was getting cut left and right throughout the history of Gopher's evolution. At one point there were plans to outsource everyone to the Minnesota Supercomputer Institute.

Of course in hindsight obtaining grants or forming a partnership with a non-profit org or an academic department might have been a better choice, especially for all the professional services requests.

edit: Also you have to remember that computing was a LOT more expensive then. I have old quotes for SparcStations and RS/6000s that were in the 0-40k range, even with an educational discount.. The Mac IIci's were not cheap either ~k when loaded up with RAM.

Interesting ideas that protocols can be monetized thus leading to more diversity.

I'm not sure I agree with the premise. Large players have many more levers to get their protocols adopted and defend their turf.

There's also the risk that all new protocols will _require_ monetization so governments and internet infrastructure orgs can extract rents/taxes from the activity on the network.

On the other hand if the Gopher Protocol was monetized I might be sipping drinks on the beach instead of toiling in the protobuf mines...

http://continuations.com/post/148098927445/crypto-tokens-and-the-coming-age-of-protocol

#googplus

#googplus

My first dev job in 1991 required that I do at least 4h of phone support and 4h of walk-in support a week.  Feeling user pain and answering the same dumb questions over and over made me a better developer and also led to a bunch of innovation:

- Mainframe Mail Woes? Develop SLIP/PopMail, give away on floppy
- Xmodem problems? Add hqx attachment support.
- Need access to Apple's techinfo CD?  Get it via Gopher.
- Indepth howtos?  Publish newsletters like you see below.

You don't have to answer the phone to help people today.  You can engage externally on mailing lists, on G+ and more.  Just remember to follow the guidelines in http://go/u2u

http://conservancy.umn.edu/bitstream/handle/11299/161886/Microcomputer_Newsletter_Jun_1991.pdf?seque...

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University of Minnesota alumni meetup in full swing.

Was asked if there will be a version of Gopher for Glass :)

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Anyone want to help Danny?

Originally shared by Paul Lindner

I just claimed my Google Scholar profile. If you create one of these profiles you should consider doing the following:

- Add it to the Other profiles section of your profile (https://plus.google.com/me/about)

- Link back to your Google+ profile (edit Homepage and link back to your profile)

Also note that that really old paper was for Gopher+, not Google+.

#gplus

I just claimed my Google Scholar profile. If you create one of these profiles you should consider doing the following:

- Add it to the Other profiles section of your profile (https://plus.google.com/me/about)

- Link back to your Google+ profile (edit Homepage and link back to your profile)

Also note that that really old paper was for Gopher+, not Google+.

#gplus

Now I can finally populate my Internet Gopher circle! FYI my old gopher Ts are now on loan to the computer museum.

hmu if you want to talk about the past present or future!

#gplus

A totally different type of Gopher than what I'm known for :)

Going to have to pick one of these up tomorrow at the Google Store...

Originally shared by Peng Ying

I wish this wasn't 11.95.. what the crap man

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