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Everybody knows about the Web, but did you know that before the Web there was Gopher, a system developed in 1991 by the University of Minnesota? This was an exciting time - a new way of delivering timely information online, even though it was menu driven! I signed on in 1993 as the UW-Eau Claire Gopher Coordinator to get it rolling across campus. (Those of you who remember retired faculty member William Mitchell will smile-he referred to me as the "Gopher Goddess".)
We bought an RS6000 AIX server named Ollie to run the Gopher protocol. Student Brian Ginsbach was the first to administer the server--he was followed by Ted Serreyn, and later Greg Lato.
At its height, Gopher was getting 80,000 to 100,000 hits per week. Content included an automated calendar of events, meeting notices, student organizations, academic departments, administrative offices and featured a WAIS search. We ran the gopher service until 1997, when the last bit of information transferred to the Web.
The Web came into being at the height of Gopher's popularity. It gave us the ability to move laterally as well as vertically from link to link--the hyperlink--and before you knew it, Gopher began to fade.
The first Web browsers didn't have built in graphic viewing enabled. You had to download a viewer to open images separately. I'll never forget the first time I viewed a Web page with Mosaic, the first browser to support in-line display of graphics, sound and video clips. Wow! It was what caused the accelerated popularity of the Web.
On January 12, 1995, after a brief pilot, the first UW-Eau Claire Web site went live. It ran on Ollie, the gopher server and was later replaced by a Windows based server named Lucy. A group of volunteer students under my direction developed these pages.
The UW-Eau Claire Web site has undergone several different looks leading to today's current design: