11/08/2017
Bob's story, starts when took a call from a woman who had a problem with Gopher.
Bob says he offered the caller some assistance, but was told “You can't do that with Gopher.”
“I assured her that she could,” Bob told us. But the caller insisted I was wrong.
“I assured her that this was completely possible,” Bob says, whereupon the caller “became very upset, cited her bona fides as a system administrator and computer expert, and told me very certainly that she could not do the thing I described with Gopher, because Gopher was not designed to do that.”
"Ma'am," Bob tells us he replied politely, "I'm one of the people who created Internet Gopher. My name is on the RFC, number 1436. Additionally I personally wrote the Unix Gopher client we're discussing, and I absolutely guarantee that my software can do what I am telling you it can do."
“She reluctantly agreed to give it a try,” Bob says, and reckons he scored his very own Marshall McLuhan moment in so doing!
And now for a little reveal. “Bob's” real name is … Bob. Bob Alberti to be precise. And his name is indeed right there on RFC 1436, “ The Internet Gopher Protocol.
