Yeah, they could have joined the Internet revolution, but Minneapolis was the center for CDC and Cray, and they just missed it. Maybe "snooted it" is the better term.
Once long ago I worked for Convex Comouter Corporation. We sold mini-super-computers. I was on the team that converted all our docs to lightly formatted text files so we could distribute them via gopher.
Three days after putting everything up on gopher one of my co-workers came in with a tape from NCSA saying "hey. I got this interesting program from the NCSA guys. They call it a web browser."
(But early versions of mosaic and navigator understood Gopher URLs, so it wasn't a complete waste of time.)
I was at Illinois during 1992-1997. The school had a number of gopher services, and then ... poof, Mosaic. I think we set up our research group's http server in 1994. One of the PIs wanted to support both gopher and http, but by then the writing was already clearly on the wall, and we only did http.
There are some gopher diehards about. http://gopher.floodgap.com/gopher/gw . The relevant Wikipedia page says 'In February 2022 Veronica indexed 325 gopher servers.'
