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.

Comments

Obsolescence, look it up

[RomulusNR]

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.
--

Flashback: 1994

[AtariDatacenter]

In 1994, I was creating commercial and organizational Gopher sites. That's right, a paid... er... Gophermaster. Within a year, it really started to lose its meaning. As mentioned, HTTP does everything Gopher could, and much more. There wasn't any point anymore.

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.

Gopher is alive and well

[qbasicprogrammer]

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?