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What Happened To Gopher?
nullspace asks: "Before the World Wide Web caught on, I initially browsed through many gopher sites. I have since then been distracted from those sites because of the growth of the WWW. The other day a thought occurred to me: whatever happened to gopher? Do people still run those servers? It would interesting to see those sites for posterity's sake." I remember gopher. I always thought the Web was a much richer medium, and that for gopher-like behavior you could always use lynx, that might just be my cynical side showing through.
Would Gopher benefit of a Gopher to i-mode or WAP gateway?
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Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
The unofficial gopher hosted at Point Loma University is still running and actively maintained, and even has a list of new Gophers for 1999 and other still-functioning Gophers. The Privacy Forum Gopher was updated just 2 weeks ago.
Gopher pages tend to be more content-rich than web pages -- Gopher simply does not allow Zero-Content sludge.
... I have never been to a horrible Gopher site.
I can tell by this comment that you never visited the Gopherserver at the old Adam-Curry owned mtv.com (now metaverse.com I believe), which went up near the end of Gopher's numbered days (1995-6).
This was basically a gopher server trying its best to be a Web site. Links to documents that weren't quite titled -- normally just meaningless filenames -- and many of the files were pictures. (Not useful pictures, either). It's worth mentioning that the only practical way to view this gophersite as it was intended (images and all) was via a Web browser. The whole intent was to use the gopher server as a repository and presentation piece for the projects started by post-MTV Curry and his associates. Of course, Gopher sucks at this, and they eventually ditched the gopher server (probably the same time they were forced to surrender the domain to MTV), but that's not saying they didn't try.
If you continue to think of Gopher as it was when it died, you're holding onto a broken "good ole days" dream. You can't believe that Gopher would somehow have been a haven from rampant commercialism and irresponsibility in the current age of the Internet. No corner is safe -- not email, not Web, not Usenet, and certainly not Gopher, if it still did practically exist.
Had there been no Web, you can bet your breeches that we would be using Gopher for pretty much the same things -- advertisements, used junk salesmen, and Personal Gopher Sites offered by ISPs to their customers. I'm sure we would have many FreeGopher providers as well, offering users the ability to create and upload content via telnet and FTP to their very own site on the Great Global Gopher (GGG). "Altaveronica" would still flood you with pages of directory links full of useless webtools and shopping gimmicks before you could reach the query window.
I'm sorry, but you gotta get real.
It should be noted too, that the same comments people make today (or did make 4-5 years ago) about the negative effects of the Web, were said about Gopher only about five years prior.
The process doesn't stop just because the technology doesn't advance. Just be thankful your beloved memories of Gopher weren't tarnished by having an AOL gopher server.
For all the web's faults -- which aren't really the Web's, but society's -- I have to say, I'm awfully glad I'm not trying to type this comment into a TurboGopher prompt window.
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Terrorists can attack freedom, but only Congress can destroy it.
Gopher pages tend to be more content-rich than web pages -- Gopher simply does not allow Zero-Content sludge.
That deserves to be moderated up; whatever it's limitations, Gopher was just about always pure information. I kind of miss it.
IE seems to not support the CSO phone book protocol. CSO runs on top of Gopher and is not an integral part of Gopher. CSO is trivial to implement, no suprise Microsoft did not.
WinInet supports retreiving of files using Gopher, what the client does with the data is up to the client. Netscape, however, supports CSO.
Cheers,
qbasic programmer
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Before the World Wide Web caught on, I initially browsed through many gopher sites. Do people still run those servers?
No[1], because the Web does everything Gopher did, and more, and better.
It would interesting to see those sites for posterity sake.
That's true, but no one's going to maintain one just for that, unless that IS why they're doing it.
I speak as the person who personally turned off the law.harvard.edu gopher server, as no one had noticed it was still running, and it hadn't logged any usage in two years. (This was in early '98.) On the one hand I was sad to destroy a small piece of history; on the other, I was happy to reclaim some cycles on the primary web server.
Kdt
[1] Well, there are probably some universities in slow-developing countries who had Internet access in circa 1994 or prior, but their national technological infrastructure hasn't advanced to the point where the Web is practical, and they still maintain their Gopher servers instead. I doubt there are very many places like that anymore, though. I would start with a search for a working Veronica server. There are still some Archie [e2][ODP] servers in existence, so I'm sure there's at least one Veronica around.
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Terrorists can attack freedom, but only Congress can destroy it.
The gopher sites remained around until about 1997 when an operating system update was installed. We didn't noticed that it wasn't running gopherd. Nobody else noticed either, it seemed.
Every major web browsers support Gopher, there's no reason not to use it. Gopher pages tend to be more content-rich than web pages -- Gopher simply does not allow Zero-Content sludge.
I see useless web sites all the time. Some newbie puts together a page with links to a few well-known web sites and publishes the trash on the World Wide Web, usually using a free web hosting service. Apatheticy to follow the HTML standards, unreadable fonts, annoying security JavaScript/VBScript/ActiveX/Java security holes, and eye burning colors are what make most of the web so ugly.
Admittedly, the World Wide Web is much more flexible and powerful than Gopher. Gopher is inferior to WWW. However, with power comes resposibility. ~99% of all web publishers are not resposible enough to follow the standards and make operable pages. Too many web pages suck.
Gopher does not give the publisher power to publish pages that suck. Gopher's directory listing makes this simply not possible. Of course, someone could host a Gopher site listing nothing, but what would be the point of that? I have never connected to a horrible Gopher site, and I have connected to thousands of horrible WWW sites.
Gopher serves what matters -- pure information. The original version of Gopher, now sometimes known as Gopher0, supports only a few data types, the most frequently used being text. (Gopher+ uses MIME content types, however). What other content types do you need than text? On the other hand, the World Wide Web is able to represent tables, frames, links, and many other useless features. Gopher is so simple and unbloated unlike HTML and the WWW.
The WWW sucks, because it can. Gopher will never suck.
The question is, will Gopher take off? Not a chance. Gopher will remain used by a select few, unlike the WWW. It will never have the trillions of zero content "homepages" and commericialization the WWW has. And frankly, I like it that way. Ever seen an advertisement on a Gopher server?
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