Let's take a trip back through time and see what the Library of Congress might  have looked like before the days of the World Wide Web. We won't have to use the 'ancient' software packages and we won't have to type in arcane commands from the Unix prompt, but we will be able to see something similar to what a user  might have seen a few years ago.

We will use the WWW and Netscape as our time machine. We will first visit the Library of Congress web site and see what exists today. Next we will take a step  backward in time as see what the Library of Congress gopher site looks like. Finally, we will visit the library's FTP site and see what the 'pioneers' had to deal with in order to get information.

The Library Today

Let's start our journey by visiting today's web site. When you get there, take a few minutes to explore the site. You'll want to get familiar with some of the 'landmarks'  so that you can look for them when you travel back in time. When you get there be sure to visit the exhibit titled, 1492: Ongoing Voyage. That's one of the landmarks you want to look for as we travel back through time.

Well, it's time to crank up the time machine. We will set the controls for 'Today'. Once we know the URL there are a few different ways we can travel to it there. Here's the URL and the three methods of travel.

http://marvel.loc.gov

1) Hardy pioneer (but not too bright) types might type the address into Netscape's URL/Location box.

2) Skilled Netscape users would use the mouse to drag-select the URL, and then copy and paste it into Netscape's URL/Location box.

3) Wimps and newbies would look desperately for a build-in hyperlink. If you fall into that category here's your link.

Choose your means of travel, visit the Library of Congress, explore the site, and be  sure to visit the 1492 exhibit. Then return to this page for the next part of the journey.

The View from a Gopher Hole

Welcome back. Did you have a nice trip? Are you ready to step back in time to  the ancient year of 1992? Did I say ancient year? Well, as far as web history goes, 1992 is as close to today as the age of the dinosaurs.

Before the existence of the web the most popular way to gather information on the  net was via a tool known as gopher. Gopher didn't allow for the integration of graphics, sound and text the way that the web does, but it did provide users with a  series of menus to follow. This menu system was much more user friendly than the really ancient directory and file structure that you will see on the last part of your journey.

OK, Sherman. Set the Wayback machine for the year 1992. (You ancient teachers might have to explain the Rocky & Bullwinkle reference.) When you get there, explore the site and be sure to try to locate the 1492 exhibit. Compare and  contrast it with today's version on the web.

Once again you can travel there via the three methods listed above. Notice that the only difference in the URL is the substitution of the word 'gopher' for 'http'. We'll  talk more about that at the end of our trip. Here's the URL.

gopher://marvel.loc.gov

You can type it, cut and paste it, or wimp out and click here.

 The Beginning of Life on the Net

Welcome back. Shake off the dust and dirt from the gopher hole and brace yourself for a rough trip back to the beginning of life as we know it on the net. If  gopher equates to the dinosaurs, I guess that FTP was when life first crawled out of the ocean and on to land.

During the earliest days of the net, information was simply stored in computers as a  series of files located in directories (or folders for you Mac users). However, the file names and directory names often gave little indication of the type of information that hid behind the name. A user would travel to a computer and retrieve  information via File Transfer Protocol (FTP). Unless you knew where and what to look for you could spend a great deal of time stumbling around in the dark before you found what you needed.

Put on your explorer caps and get ready to see an FTP site. Keep in mind you are going to be seeing it via Netscape. Netscape helps you out by presenting the information in a somewhat more organized setting than you would have seen in the  'good old days'. It also helps keep track of your travels through the site. The old FTP software didn't do any of this for you.

Once again we only have to make one small change to the URL. When you exit the  time machine you will be at the root directory of the Unix computer that stores the information For Mac users that would equate to the having clicked on the hard  drive icon. I won't give you any further information about where to go and what to do. I'll leave that up to you. After all, you're an intrepid explorer by now. Your  primary task is to find the 1492 exhibit and see how it differs from the gopher and WWW exhibits. If you are successful in doing that, try to find some other familiar landmarks. Then return here for a short wrap up.

Here's the URL. I'm going to make it easy for you this time and turn the URL into a hyperlink. All you have to do is click on it and you will be whisked away to the root directory.

ftp://marvel.loc.gov

Putting It All In Perspective

Unless you knew something about Unix computers you were faced with an immediate dilemma. It was something like a cross between 'The Lady and the  Tiger" and "Let's Make a Deal". Did you choose the correct door the first time? If you were a pioneer you would have known what each directory contained and that the /pub directory led to all of the documents that were open to the /public.

I'm sure that you eventually found your way to the 1492 exhibit. You might be  surprised to learn that the documents and information that exist there are some of the same documents that you are seeing when you visit today's web site. You see,  much of the information that exists today on the net was stored on the computers long before gopher or WWW came into existence.

The creators of gopher and WWW realized that people wouldn't and couldn't  rewrite all of that information. For that reason they created their tools to access information in whatever form it was stored. Gopher is a software tool that is used  to create menus that accesses the old FTP sites as well as the newer documents stored in gopher directories. WWW is a software tool that can access information stored in FTP sites, gopher sites, or the latest WWW sites.

That's where the small changes in the URL come into play. With web browsers the first part of the URL tells the browser what type of operation to perform on the information at the site. It's a handy thing to know. If you like to really dig and  explore, you can often visit a web site and then change the http to gopher or ftp. Often that will allow you to quickly find infomation that isn't accessible or  immediately obvious through the web browser. Of course this will only work on sites that have been around a while and have gopher or ftp information stored in the same computer.

One thing has remained unchanged since the beginning of net-time. That is the way information is stored. It is still stored as files in directories. What has changed is the  software tools that access the information. The software has made information much easier to locate and retrieve. Where once you had to be a 'geek' to surf the Internet, now all you need is a PC, a web browser and an Internet connection.

I hope that you have a little more understanding and appreciation of the history of the net and the software used to access it. But don't get overconfident. I've only  shown you one small piece of the full picture. The more you find out about the past the more you can appreciate the present and anticipate the future. Do some research on your own about net history.

Happy surfing...

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