The web's most important decision.

For a while, in the early 90’s, the web was in competition with Gopher, an alternative Internet-backed protocol developed at the University of Minnesota (…) Gopher was hierarchical by design, a stark contrast to the sprawling, nonhierarchic hyperlink of the web. Gopher also put resources behind search and design of sites years before technologies like Google and browsers like Netscape would do the same for the web.

As a result, it was pretty popular. Maybe more so than the web. But there’s a reason we don’t hear much about Gopher these days.