Protocols Before The Web Won
forms and protocols 1994 partlyLinks to gopher, telnet, news and wais, back when HTTP was one option among several.
In 2026: The schemes are still valid URLs and browsers still parse them, they simply have no handler any more. Gopher support left Firefox with version 4 in 2011 and was cut from IE in 2002. Every early web page had a links section that looked like this.
Where it came from: HTML 2.0 (RFC 1866) and the URL scheme registrations of the early 1990s. Wikipedia ↗
<ul>
<li><a href="gopher://gopher.example.edu/">Campus gopher server</a>
<li><a href="telnet://bbs.example.com:23">The BBS (telnet)</a>
<li><a href="news:comp.infosystems.www.authoring.html">The HTML newsgroup</a>
<li><a href="nntp://news.example.net/alt.hypertext">Same thing, full URL</a>
<li><a href="wais://wais.example.org/database">WAIS index</a>
<li><a href="ftp://ftp.example.com/pub/">Public FTP archive</a>
<li><a href="ftp://anonymous:me@example.com@ftp.example.com/pub/">FTP with a login</a>
<li><a href="finger://user@example.com">Finger someone</a>
<li><a href="file:///C|/My Documents/notes.txt">A file on your own hard disk</a>
</ul>