Archive: August 25th, 2016

Mozilla Open Design – branding without walls

Mozilla are updating their brand identity and they’re doing it in the open. A brave, but fascinating move.

The rise and fall of the Gopher protocol | MinnPost

A deep dive into the history of Gopher. For a while there, it looked like it was going to be bigger than the World Wide Web.

This article is filled with timely details:

The programmers were young guys, mostly in their 20s and, like McCahill, mostly huge Nirvana fans. Paul Lindner, a coding wunderkind from northern Minnesota who was dubbed the Gopher Dude for his evangelism, had long metal-head hair and signed Gopher emails with lyrics like “You have to spit to see the shine” from Babes in Toyland. Early Gopher servers were named Mudhoney, Danzig, and Anthrax.

Ah, Babes In Toyland! It’s like the soundtrack to my time in art college in the early 90s. I remember one of the best gigs ever being a triple bill of The Sultans Of Ping, Babes In Toyland, and Theraphy? at Sir Henrys in Cork.