Slashdot Mirror
Bring Back Gopher Campaign
A reader pointed us over to the Gopher Manifesto, the document of record of those who want to bring back Gopher as one of the most-used tools on the Internet. It's a pretty crazy idea, but it does have some good points.
Sure, gopher is text friendly and is better suited to the visually impaired and speaking web browsers, but a few ADA lawsuits will get some more "text only" links showing up on CNN.com, microsoft.com, *.gov, etc.
Bell thought it would make a great news and education media. Sorry, Alex, but talk radio has your invention beat out on that score. ;-)
Think how appalled he would be to learn about being "on hold", or telemarketing, or teenage girls spending scads of time to discuss matters as inconsequential as... whatever it is that teenage girls discuss on the phone! (No, my fellow geeks, I have not figured out women, either, even the immature specimens. Anyone wanna ask Natalie Portman?) Throw in cell phones, 900-numbers and phone sex lines, mail-order shopping, and anything first discussed in Phrack, and the consequences of Bell's invention would be both alien and incomprehensible to Bell himself.
So why should the Internet or web be any different?
the good old days, before graphics
but...what about porn!?
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"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win."
Damn i miss them good old days. I remember waiting for 12AM to roll around so i could be 1st on the one line BBS that was a member of a multi BBS FE game in my state...I never found a new game that was as fun as them aol ANSI ones.
I have to return some videotapes...
On the other hand, Slashdot, of course, has features not present in nntp such as moderation and, and, ...what else?
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Fuck the system? Nah, you might catch something.
Gopher was an absolutely wonderful tool for gathering information, without the encumbrances of graphics, MIDI, Flash., etc.
If google could host an Archie/Veronica search engine in addition to their web index, we'd have a wonderful infrastructure again that is data-centric, instead of so much emphasis on eye candy over content.
Bring Back Gopher!
Besides this is an easier way to shed karma than waiting around to see if I've been shredded in meta-moderation yet.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
I stole this from dictionary.com
- --------------------------------
Casbah also Kasbah (kzbä, käz-).
n.
1. A castle or palace in northern Africa.
2. Often casbah. The older section of a city in northern Africa or the Middle East.
-----------------------------------------------
[French from Arabic dialectal qabah, from Arabic qaabah, fortress.]
End plagarism
See also:
1. Charles Boyer in "Algiers"
2. most any Pepe Le Peu cartoon
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Microsoft's Law of Software Envelopment: Every program expands until it looks like a web page or can author (a proprietary version of) one, or both.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
About gopher at minnesota, I'm trying to remember a bit about licensing of the gopher server or protocol which really killed what was left of gopher when the web was taking off.
The Virtual Bookcase: book reviews
Unacceptable. "Your browser is broken."
Fuck Slashdot
Does anyone know where the author got the 10k% number?
Douglas Calvert
Maybe they should preach to the choir until they are converted before attempting to take this to the teeming millions.
Free Mac Mini. Yes, I'm
Amen brother! I couldn't have said it better myself. One qualm however - Chewbacca is obviously not from Endor! If you read Star Wars Saga part IV, in chapter 17 it is clearly stated that Chewbacca is a large accumulation of pubic hair brought to life by Technomages from Alderon. Please do research before posting to the forums.
Scuttlemonkey is a troll
If you need a copy of Netscape 1.1 for windows. You can find it just like that! :-)
You wish!
Slash is a replacement for NNTP like a 14.4 modem is a replacement for an T-1. (Not an OC-3, but definately a T-1.)
So you mean Slash is the archaic, obsolete, low end version of NNTP? I think not! The analogy fails.
Is slash distributable? Think how nice it'd be nice to access the local Slash node next time Slashdot is slow for you.
No, and that's excellent. You want to keep discussions localized to preserve resources. It's precisely this distribution that makes Usenet such a pain to ISPs. Even when you stop getting binary groups, the amount of transfer per day is huge. And that's not talking about posts that are simply lost because of this inefficient, distributed approach.
NOTE: I'm not saying distribution is bad, just that once it gets too large it starts to fail and that it's the wrong solution for /.
Can Slash sustain long-term conversation, like over a period of weeks rather then about 4 hours per article on a high-traffic site?
No and that's excellent. I want to discuss a bit over an article and let it drop. I'm not willing to argue over the same thing over and over as time goes by. Bring on the new, take away the old.
Can it be accessed by a myriad of different clients (there's a big HELL NO!)?
Excuse me? Isn't the web large enough for you?
Distributing binaries?
What about them? Weren't you so fervorous about discussions? IMHO, you should only care about binaries if you want to trade porn or post warez, for I have yet to find a legitimate use for those on Usenet.
How do you DOS Usenet?
That's a minor issue considering /.'s size and its link. If you considering serious DOS'ing, the whole web is on danger of falling apart. The only way to reduce these threats is either to kill usability by reworking protocols like ICMP and UDP or to kill anonymity.
Flavio
A good use for gopher would be for storing books, historical documents, official documents (like laws), and stuff like that. These don't need hyperlinks but could use the "menus" in gopher for like tables of contents and that sort of thing.
# apt-get install gopher gopherd
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Unselfish actions pay back better
Gopher+ tried to solve some of these problems, but they'd already been solved, more thoughtfully, by the fine folks at CERN. Gopher+ was too little, too late (and further encumbered by an ill-conceived anti-corporate licensing scheme).
I'm not here to laugh at Gopher--it was a great first pass, and I cut my teeth on it like many others did. But it really was just a first pass; let's not forget the reasons we left it behind in the first place.
(Oh yeah, and yes, the Gophers are the U of M's sports teams.)
Number of bytes is exactly what I meant. I didn't mean as a measure of how informative. That was the whole point of that quip.
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Vidi, Vici, Veni
Just rename it to Beaver and watch the hits roll in. :-)
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Some of the things that make gopher seem antiquated are just the things we might need for an intelligently navigable space on PDAs.
Right now, the average web page looks terrible on a palm - the graphics don't fit the resolution, the links are often broken, and (particularly with cached content like a synched AvantGo) you never know which pages are stored and which are missing.
It seems gopher would solve some of these problems, providing a hierarchical space that's more well thought out for a PDA user's experience. I believe there's also less protocol necessary for the browser to understand.
HTTP is as stateless as Gopher is, so there's no difference here. Remember that cookies, session handling in PHP and the like are hacks on top of the HTTP protocol. Of course you can serve dynamic content with Gopher given a server that can pull such a stunt. Shameless plug: Visit gopher://gopher.hacx.cx/ for my dynamic Gopher server with CGI-like functions written in 26 lines of Perl (this includes all the documents on the gopher. Granted, most of the documents don't have more than 1 line of text).
Regards,
johl
Gopher started at the University of Minnesota, it was given the name Gopher after the school mascot, the Golden Gopher.
I used to like gopher, but haven't heard anything on it for a while. It is all but dead now. (I feel like Obi-Wan talking about the Republic...) Gopher was cool, and hey, maybe when the world wide web turns into nothing but one gigantic pool of commercialism, it'll turn into a haven for Nerds, along with slashdot.
At least, it was interesting about reading about early linux installs, BSD, and old DOS programs.
------ 24.5% slashdot pure
Both Internet Exsplorer and Mozilla suppor the gopher protocol, so compatablity isn't a problem. Almost everyone who surfs the web already has a gopher client :P
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
If part of Gopher was the parseing of HTML documents.... then we could conceivably access the entire WWW via Gopher. yes, I know there are issues with that, but lets face it, most of the CONTENT of the web is in text form, and would work with Gopher.
PDFs, and forms of streaming audio and video... That would make Gopher viable again. As another post of mine here says: I'll take a FUNCTIONAL Internet over a glitzy one
-Marchie
~Donald / Just RTFM
... a gopher:// link to the manifesto?
There was a program out called GN way back in the day that was a gopher server that could serve very basic web stuff, too. That might not be a bad place to start.
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If I actually could spell I'd have spelled it right in the first place.
As to the lack of gopher scheme in Netscape... I've always believed it was bad to load a lot of scheme into the browsers anyway, since they usually fxck up the implementation (FTP is usually wrong "in the corners", for instance; making the compactness of the URL notation useless when you're trying to exchange a file and ICQ doesn't want to work grumble grumble). I'd suggest finding an HTTP proxy that does gopher... does Squid? It'd be a shade easier to add gopher to Squid than to Mozilla, if necessary, I bet, and we could all share in the fruits of the labour. It makes a lot more sense to have a good local cache proxy running, then all your browsers have consistent, upgradeable, correctable, expandable, etc. behaviours in URL and cache.
http://aic.hygiene.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/Software/Gop her/
Hands in my pocket
Actually this already exists to an extent with LINK REL
The Dancing Jakob Nielsen wrote a short paper on its implementation in iCab.
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Am I the only one who thinks Microsoft is a misnomer? Perhaps Macrosoft would be a better fit?
Veronica-2 is already slashdotted...
Don't like my sig? I don't either.
surely freeing a load of the bandwidth that the non-commercial web takes up will just increase the bandwidth available to the commercial web. We all know that will get eaten up straightaway.
Just like a nice 5 lane motorway (freeway, whatever), take all the trucks off it and put them on trains, the cars just take up the slack.
Especially if we are talking about bringing the third world online. The much lower bandwidth requirements make it an excellent choice for areas
with poor infrastructure. Gopher, Lynx, Archie et. al. may still have an important role to play in helping areas like this boot strap their way up.
My $.02
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
From the manefesto -
Gopher is an infoserver which can deliver text, graphics, audio, and multimedia to clients. Keeping documents "link clean", making linking a function of the server info-tree and not in the doc
Now think of having the links related to a realtime search rather than the server.. ooops I already coded that, guess you'll all have to wait for its release then...
Any sufficiently advanced man is indistinguishable from God
A picture is worth a thousand words. And a picture next to a textual description is even more useful. Or so says I. There's a happy middle ground between fluff and befuddlement.
Wah!
IMG tags lead to SCRIPT tags, SCRIPT tags lead to APPLET tags, APPLET tags lead to suffering...
And dancing leads to fucking, which leads to more Baptists...
"I will gladly pay you today, sir, and eat up
Sacred cows make the best burgers.
Or does gopher seem ideal to use on a WAP phone ? (ie. mostly text and links)
anyone know a gopher2wap proxy ?
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This was a very nice document. Thanks for posting the link. It summarized the gopher services quite well. If a moderator sees this, please give a +Informative to the parent of this post.
assert(expired(knowledge));
He says in the article! Mathematical formulae!
Trees can't go dancing
So do them a big favor
Pretend dancing stinks!
It was many-many - oh-so-many - moons ago when I was using Gopher to find things, read docs and so on. Man that was life: net was fast, easy and to the point.
... and fucked up everything. Sun helped with Java - Microsoft pimped it shamelessly and then all went down in flames. Then lusers got "on the information highway" and there you go - there's another project - called Internet2... possibly to get rid of them lusers.
Then pr0n came
Ta' hell with it - gimme a terminal and a lynx and I'm happy... well - for some values of happy - anyways.
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Ugly or not, I don't say WWW doesn't have its place but more special purpose programs also have their use.
:).
Gopher is one thing (quickly browse/search/read) hierarchically organized information, NNTP/usenet clients is another example.
Formerly Slashdot would have been a usenet newsgroup. You could interface to all groups with a standardized, optimized interface (the newsreader of *your* choice) that allows much faster and more efficient browsing. (in fact I use nnslashdots backend to the GNUS newsreader now and then to read/port to slashdot as if it were a usenet newsgroup
The web created a chaotic situation of unstructured information. All pages look different, all have different search/index mechanism, even more so for all Web-based discussion forums.
I think it is a very good idea to move back to the more structured situation of gopher/usenet etc. It won't appeal to all people (most people for that matter) that value flashy graphics, banners, interesting designs etc. over efficient and speedy reading of information.
Specialized clients have functionality built in, that makes searching/filtering of content uniform no matter what or where you're reading. I can use my usenet kill-files in any newsgroup; the same cannot be said of web-based discussion groups that each have their own look&feel and filtering options (if any).
How can you say that? I hate Deja's interface. It is many times as slow as a decent usenet client (such as GNUS).
Yes you can search, as an archival system Deja has it's place. But it cannot replace a decent usenet client at all.
The drawback from the user point of view is that he is confronted with different kind of navigation/indexes/searching on every website.
Uniform client programs such as newsreaders or gopher help in this respect.
The excellent newsreader GNUS has a 'nnslashdot' backend, which allows you to read/post to slashdot as if it were a regular Usenet group.
I can tell you using that is much more efficient and convenient than the crappy web interface.
Gopher was a very limited system, in protocol and navigation capabilities. It was superceded because http/html was vastly superior. The whole basis of the web is in hyperlinks! I think the whole idea of gopher was to make text document retrieval marginally easier for people unable to grok ftp.
I ran a gopher server in oct/nov 1991, and a wais server in dec 1992. Wais had potential and true utility, but gopher was a complete waste of time.
aem
-a.e.mossberg
UUCP (Unix-to-Unix Copy) is a command which can deliver arbitrary text or binary data between peers. UUCP is real -- and it was fully functional in 1986, even without advertisements!
But once the Internet became commercialized, this ideal network protocol was forgotten and the UUCP dream was scrapped.
The dirty little secret is that today, many of the most popular unices still support UUCP.
And mathematical formulae seem to indicate that the speed benefits of putting the entire internet on a non-interactive protocol could increase access speeds by over 10,000%!
Is it time for a new new Rererenaissance on the Internet, to bring back the promise of the early years?
A search on Freshmeat reveals Gopher+ that was apparantly released March of this year.
Maybe I'll install it when I have some time and see if it's any good.
No its not. Exactly where is this Apache Gopher Server they wish for? Will any of the currently existing gopher servers run on anything more recent then os/2 warp 3? Or are you wanting to bring that back as well. Seriously though: Gopher is no better than the web, a shitty gopher site is as bad as a crappy webpage. Are all of these moronic Microsoft-laden WYSIWYG wizards currently making most websites, suddenly going to become thoughtfull, standards compliant gopher-site coders? Yeah right!!
Incorporating graphics into the navigational/design aspects of site *is* a valid thing to do. Maybe sometimes it is not needed, (and wireless is certainly a great example of this*) but then just don't use it. I think UI design issues should not become part of a networking protocol. I vastly prefer html, where I can format my information with much greater freedom.
* Of course that ignores the fact that wireless displays will become better and bandwidth will increase.....
The current Slashdot moderation system is made by gay communists!
Lets bring back the 1) Steam Engine 2) Lamp radio
On the other hand, Slashdot, of course, has features not present in nntp such as moderation and, and, ...what else?
You can "click pretty widgets to kill time" :)
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Turn on, log in, burn out...
Just use Lynx on a black and white terminal server.
Real men don't need signitures!!!
That's what I was thinking. I think hyperlinks in documents is a good thing, but I do agree with their point that we should try to return to something simpler. Hm, gopher sites with some kind of rich document format (PDF?) or a markup language like HTML(although that wouldn't make any sense)?
I don't really see using gopher as being a big improvement in anything but speed. They are really fighting an uphill battle against the web. How are they going to compete with that large content base? I guess they could coexist with it, but I don't think they could get very far.
I think their best chance would be a new system based on gopher concepts. But again, it all seems kind of pointless. A new Internet hyperdocument system would be cool though.
I know when I started using the internet, around 6 or 7 years ago, the guy who was teach me what the internet was all about, in hindsight, a really cool guy, was always using gopher. He tried to explain it to me a couple times, and it was denfitely he preference to use that instead of http. Anyway, what I do know and have heard about gopher makes it sound like it could be a suitable p2p medium. It's all about sharing media, right? Why not use it as the second coming of scour? I bet this could be done, but again, probably won't. I don't know enough about it, but let me know if this is a feasable solution.
Th
I think that if it caught on, you would have a lot of people involved that now know a lot more about how to present information to users, and the results would show.
WWJD -- What Would Jimi Do?
WWJD -- What Would Jimi Do?
(Smash amp, burn guitar, take home the groupies)
But I just didn't GOPHER it...
... *ahem* sorry.
Get it?!? GOPHER? *laugh!*SNORT!* Go Fer? *laugh* Go... errr....*ahem* for. It... was
"Put a glide in yo stride and a dip in yo hip, and come on to the Mothership!"
Ceci n'est pas une sig.
For all of you who are comparing Gopher and HTML by saying that Gopher is better because it doesn't have all of the unnecessary eye candy - how many of you are viewing Slashdot in light mode?
Just wondered.
oojah
Do you have any better hostages?
Can we also bring back those BBS systems like Citadel, where people log in a get involved in discussions..........hey......wait a minute.......
It's either on the beat or off the beat, it's that easy.
I moderate therefore I rule!
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Just try this gopher client(a gopher protocol link, ofcourse :-)
I like this quote from the gopher.ptloma.edu gopher page: "Internet Explorer is miserable as a Gopher client" :-)
the same # of people who hit a website hit a gopher site, would the gopher server have a better chance of surviving being slashdotted? maybe slashdot could mirror sites on gopher, then point to the gopher link...
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Peace,
Lord Omlette
ICQ# 77863057
[o]_O
So you're suggesting that gopher will do away with idiotic site design? I don't think so. Idiots exist - live with it.
I/O Error G-17: Aborting Installation
Can I do php on gopher yet? <gr>
:wq
What can gopher do that a mainly text website can't? Or even a mainly text ftp site can't?
And I don't under stand this "bring back campaign". Gopher wasn't really taken away. It's more accurate to say, that Gopher has been left behind. Abandoned.
There's nothing stopping people from running gopher servers or using them. The fact is most of the techheads have abandoned gopher, even those who _were_ running gopher servers before.
The Gopher manifesto itself had tons of URLs in it. And you couldn't click on those URLs. Oh yeah, that's one of those great features of Gopher - it doesn't support links.
Almost seems like people are asking for Gopher because of things it _can't_ do, not the things it can do. You might as well just ask for a crippled web browser and web server. It's easier to get those. Or just surf with stuff off. I do that very often and the sites I find useful work just fine.
While you guys are at it, you might as well start a "bring back telex campaign". Doh.
Cheerio,
Link.
If people are really interested they could try making a Gopher+ web application. But that'll just prove that WWW can do almost everything gopher can do and more.
Personally I think Gopher vs WWW is just like Telegraph vs Telephone.
Though it's still very useful for some things, its time has passed and Joe Public is unlikely to revisit it.
We'll see gopher rear its head when everyone switches to black and white TV. In comparison it's even more likely that stuff like Xanadu will become more popular than Gopher.
Cheerio,
Link.
I got a better idea: let's just convince everyone to design their sites just for lynx and we'll have all the speed we could want on an ASCII display. To top it off -- we don't even have to reconfigure our servers, and for the same effort all sites will work with all current and future browsers too.
Sorry for being so cynical, but I felt it had to be said.
--Aaron Greenberg
This is the first good idea I've heard regarding the Internet in months! I hope Gopher makes a comeback. I miss it!
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I'm from Canada eh.
We here in the great white north would prefer a protocol called the "beaver".
minor nit: lynx is already a gopher client (:
lynx gopher://atralakh.dyndns.org
[biting on the troll hook] exclusive server, d00d. [/biting on the troll hook]
IHBT. IHW. IWHAND.
Three words for this:
image map navigation
w3m does admirably on *some* of them, but not all. You can't expect something
that's supposed to have a small memory footprint as well as reasonable
simplicity and security to be able to parse through javascript imagemaps
without a real headache.
As far as HTTP complexity, I didn't exactly say what I meant. I meant the
overextension of the HTML protocol in terms of special effects that don't
really add to content, but waste bandwidth.
yup, I agree there, but tell that to the web designers for some of the :/
mom & pop companies. That's typically who I have to deal with
Mod this up!
That the URL for this "manifesto" is http://www.scn.org/~bkarger/gopher-manifesto and not gopher://www.scn.org/bkarger/gopher-manifesto. This does NOT show solidarity.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Hopefully I didn't put any [] around my words.
>To put it another way: It's the page designer's fault for creating overly complex pages.
That's not so simple. Most of times, stupid HTML code is created by WYSIWYG editor, the worst of all being Word (go look at the source code of this example site, if you dare). For a truly better HTML, we need to force the include of a low-speed connection emulator in all HTML editor like Frontpage or Dreamweaver. It would be a very simple navigator, strictly conforming to the standard, and loading the page in memory at about 1.5 kilobyte per seconds. With sometimes random stalled waitings, and, once it's finished loading, it would also output a list of errors like those produced by the official validator. I think the world will be brighter with that.
For those of you able to read French, I wrote a year ago a Strict Code of Internet Ethic who ban unecessary use of images, cookies, applets, etc; and which insist on the necessity to conform to HTML standards. Yeah, except the title, it's in French, not in English.
sigmentation fault
If people did crazy stuff like that then there wouldn't be a need for XML and all it's buzzword-enabled incarnations. Remember, too, that once upon a time the blink tag was contextual as well.
just "I want this in a big font".
just make css tags <iwantthisinabigfong> </iwantthisinabigfont>
2 1337 4 u!
The "retro" feel and bring back the past rings true for me in a lot of this topic. I am not so sure that it is the capabillities that I miss so much but the smaller, friendlier community that sprung up before the net was won. Lynx, Gopher, and the good old ISCA BBS were a whole different world.
Enjoyable, glad I was there but I don't think I would choose to go back. I like the wild and wolly interest of images, sounds, and stupid trolls.
~~ What's stopping you?
The tags you've mentioned are aids to presenting text - they separate images from the text, give some specific boundaries on how to deal with images, and the browser can treat them relatively independently. With the HEIGHT and WIDTH tags, browsers can render text and bring images on later - improving the textual experience, because you don't have to wait for all the images to load. In other words, those tags make text the pre-eminent data form over HTTP.
Honestly you're just being silly. Those had nothing to do with big money - big money mostly slid into the abyss of applets, then myriad plug-ins, now patently ridiculous server tools (which I fight daily). In each, html threw a few tags specifying how to isolate the crap from the text - keeping text supreme.
Hopefully, XHTML will bring back the original intention of HTML -- *logical* document structure instead of haphazard, ad hoc mutilation based mostly on visual structure that's the norm of today's average website.
The current state of HTML (ie. its average use today) is just sad... It's my firm belief that anything overly popular eventually declines. I call it the Mass Entropy Principle. Every time something exceeds a certain threshold of popularity, entropy runs wild and free. That is why, although you express your doubts about bringing back gopher, I think the idea has merit (even if the gopher protocol itself may no longer work in today's world).
Entropy is kept in check only beneath a certain threshold. Anything that gets overly popular very quickly deteriorates into mostly worthless crap. So, maybe only a minority of users will be interested in a gopher reincarnation (maybe the original protocol, maybe a new idea built from the same principles). But the small size is what will nurture quality.
The Web of today is just quantity, vast quantities, but very little quality. Witness what happens with something like Microsoft -- catering to the masses. Popular. Big bucks. Big bugs. Look at Slashdot. Used to be small, informative, useful. Look at it now. Large numbers. Big popularity. Lotsa cash. And lotsa trolls and blind rabid zealot syndromes too.
Poll Mastah
Sure it was ugly, not flashy, and boring, but it did have one thing I liked.. I don't remember any spam, banners, BS, or dumbshits trying to make an easy buck off of it.
That was back when the internet was a tool for information, and not profit.
If it were revived, I assure you that greedy entrepreneurs would find some way or another to exploit it and eventually make it as useless as newsgroups have become (due to excessive spammage).
~ The Irony is, The only reason I'm not at Berkeley right now is because I was on acid during my SAT's..
The solution gopher for what about pr0n...
http://www.asciibabes.com
E.
Build Your Own PVR/HTPC news, reviews, &
Gopher.ptloma.edu sure is slow...
Didn't Gopher fade because the University of Minnesota wanted licensing fees for Gopher servers and you could get the CERN and NCSA HTTP servers for free?
I remember using gopher more than WWW in the beginning of 1994. But I never really liked it. It's too hierarchal. Also, it's not necessarily free as in speech or beer, as the originators said that they might charge for it in the future. Perhaps they have changed their mind, and it was good they were honest about it, but I think that is an important reason why it couldn't take off.
Employee of Inrupt, Project Release Manager and Community Manager for Solid
HTTP is not stateless in the same way that Gopher is. HTTP includes header information transferred from client to server, which at least allows the client to identify itself.
The Gopher UDP ``protocol'' has no facility for identifying the client on the other end of the server: note that neither the IP address (which is non-unique) nor the UDP source port (which the client may vary from request to request) is sufficient for this task. Thus, the only way to maintain session information in the case that two clients are connecting from the same box is to have each client virtually connect to a different Gopher page! Needless to say, this is not pretty...
Recall that Gopher's big ``efficiency win'' (and it wasn't that big in any case I ever saw) came largely from the fact that it is completely stateless. At the time, that was believed to be a good thing.
But stateless basically means sessionless. It was incredibly difficult to have restricted access sites, per-user configuration, and the like, because there was by design absolutely no implicit or explicit connection possible between successive messages sent from a given client.
To be fair, sessions are hard even using HTTP. But it was much worse for Gopher. I, for one, was glad to see it go.
funny thing is that the web now has interfaces for NNTP browsing that are in most cases more friendly than most USEnet programs
This is true, and this is why it's difficult to make sweeping over-generalisations like "the web is better than nntp because..." as I did above, because the web is so damn useful and adaptable that it can be twisted round to provide an interface to just about anything. We've got web portals for email; databases; newsgroups; mailing lists; hell, I sometimes log into one of our boxes using an ssh java applet over https. There aren't many other options from a payphone!
And the thing I think is especially good is that it gets so many more people using them than would have done otherwise. A slight downside is that lots of these portals are getting more "pretty" with larger graphics, etc, which kind of defeats the point of some, but it's worth it to get the things used.
So maybe gopher could have a bit more of a future than we gave it credit for if web gateways such as the ones mentioned in other posts become really popular and common, but somehow I doubt it's going to happen.
Dave
If you use gopher exclusively... how did this post end up on Slashdot? Slashdot could never have taken off under Gopher... it LINKS TO OTHER SITES! Hence it gets its news. Hmm.
Wes
Wes - Crazy like a fox.
You had to use Archie and FTP. Oh the horrors! Oh, and let's not forget the joys of 2400baud modems.. *sniff* Wes wes@somanmbulant.net
Wes
Wes - Crazy like a fox.
I was just thinking about that myself, having done a search for "warez" on Veronica, it appears that not many people are thinking that way either. In fact the second result I got was some dude who was reporting a warez server to the FBI. Keep in mind that there are natives there, and they may not like a sudden invasion of stuff that they see as superflous or illicit, regardless of your views.
Fist Prost
"We're talking about a planet of helpdesks."
Fist Prost
"We're talking about a planet of helpdesks."
-Jaron Lanier
gopher://wiretap.spies.com
Paul Anderson
"I drank WHAT?!" -- Socrates
I'm sorry, but what you're saying makes absolutely NO sense to me.
It really bothers you that much that people are using the web for more than text? Who ever said there was anything wrong with eye candy? Especially finding the eye candy I want to see when I want to see it. You should have fun browsing around on all your favorite text-only pages and not complain about what the rest of us sight-enhanced folks are doing.
-Richie
www.PopCap.com
Wow. I decided to fool around, typed gopher://gopher.ptloma.edu/ into Internet Explorer 5.5. It works, no glitches. Just says something about NS, doesn't it? (AFAIK, gopher is dead in Netscape.)
So, you're saying 6250MBytes of graphics. My God, most of my movies are less than that, let alone any of my pron......so, where are these sites with pron..er..graphics?
--
303infinity Rocks, buy their CD's.
The BBS scene is alive and well, especially (but not exclusively) in the hacking/phreaking subculture. Check out http://napalm.firest0rm.org/issue6.txt for a decently up-to-date list of active BBSes.
Why isn't their page gopher://?
Just wondering....
Don't forget Jughead =)
I send you this message in order to have your advice.
Apparantly not =)
I send you this message in order to have your advice.
If text were really the best way to get information across, the "big-bucks" behind web marketing would have kept the web in that form. Advertisers aren't stupid. Those flashy images are there to present a message, and they work. Just because it's a commercial message that you didn't particularly want doesn't mean that it's not an effective form of communication.
If there were to be some revolution that took us back to a completely text-based protocol, don't for one second think that commercial interests wouldn't bastardize it for their own purposes as well.
"My job is being right when other people are wrong." -- George Bernard Shaw
<A HREF="/bin/"><IMG ALIGN=absbottom BORDER=0 SRC="internal-gopher-menu"> bin/</A>
bring it back. I still run iis3 with a gopher server on it. LONG LIVE GOPHER!!!
Heck, where has the time gone? I just recalled being an unwashed kid with big eyes and Commmmodore 64.
;-)] can be so ignorant of life beyond their vision-impaired surroundings.
Now I'm an unwashed adult with big eyes and a PDA.
Serious, somehow we lost the spirit when we grew up. At the same time, many of us experienced a type of excitement that modern script kiddies will never be able to comprehend.
Yet, it looks to me as if a revival of Gopher is pretty much an attempt to turn back the clock.
Resistance is futile, time has passed and Gopher won't make us young again.
So, it doesn't really make sense.
I read some comments here about Gopher being a good alternative for the developing world. Must have been from people who never left their apartment, let alone the developed world.
The problem that many people in underdeveloped countries have to overcome in order to bridge the digital divide are [IN REVERSE ORDER]:
-get fast access speeds
-learn to use the net beyond IRC and mail
-learn English [it IS the top language on Earth]
-explore the www
-get an internet connection
-get a computer
-feed, house, cloth your family
-get a job
-get an education
to achive that, counties must first:
-find means to feed their people
-house them
-provide basic health care
-estalish an electricity grid
-get a phone network
-provide public education
-build an economy
-make phones affordable
-offer higher learning
So, no gopher is not the solution for countries that have not enough power plants, let alone phone lines.
However, gopher could be a great solution for W@P as someone here suggested. Trouble is, by the time a standard would be established 3G and 4G sytems will be available and nobody would use a gopher-based system, if they can have streaming video instead.
While I really liked the stroll down Memory Lane, I am utterly disturbed that some IT's finest [/.ers
Are we heading for a quarreling, ignorant techelite on hand and 'all the others' on the other? This looks more and more like the plot of a SciFi B-movie, doesn't it?
Just on the side, we have no problems whatsoever with accessing gopher sites [evem the ones that have in the subject line that they can't be accessed with IE] using IE 5.5 - I dunno what some of you guys are raving on about again.
GOOD ON YA!
They should mark this up...
Let's see, do you mean multimedia protocol as in high-bandwidth like MPEG and GIF, or do you mean low bandwidth multimedia protocols like shockwave flash, XML, and HTML?
HTML is extremely versatile in the fact that it can go from just pure ascii to a presentation format. That said, XML is far more versatile and will last forever once it has finally been implemented.
There is no advantage to Gopher! If you want plain text pages, then use stinking plain ASCII as a page on an HTTP server.
I think this post interface proves the point, you can use HTML, Code, Extrans, or if you prefer, you can still use plain old text... on an html server even! Bet you'd never thought of that!
I long for the pre-commercial days as much as anyone, but the protocol doesn't have to change for that, just the content does.
No problem. You don't need any WAP software or new servers for this... all you need is LYNX!
Think about it - it strips off all the excess crap, would be very easy to navigate with the typical arrow buttons that already come on many phones and wireless devices... and best of all, to do it you'd get to load Linux on your wireless device of choice! I wonder if IBM and Nokia could work together on a Linux phone/radar detector...
"There's a party," she said,
"We'll sing and we'll dance,
It's come as you are."
Good riddance.
--
--
Eat right, exercise regularly, die anyway.
[*] "I'll read this later, there's still a few more links to follow," kind of thing. Its hard to absorb good information off the web, isnt it? How many of you have read 1/100th of your book marked pages? Not many, I bet. I've often found myself spending more time gathering links than actually reading the information I originally sought.
--
--
Eat right, exercise regularly, die anyway.
I've been reading several comments here which basically denounce Gopher as being useless because "its' old", or "we've moved on".
But, it's like any other tool, we should find the right tool for the right job. If HTML is being extended to do everything AND the kitchen sink, it might not do as good a job as Gopher for particular applications of the technology.
Notice that as new technologies emerge, the likelihood of Gopher finding a niche will increase. Perhaps the boom in wireless devices is such a niche, for instance.
Maybe Gopher isn't behind the times, it may actually be ahead of its time..
In any case, our "consumeristic" society tells us to equate old with bad, and new with good. I urge you to judge something on its merits.
f u cn rd ths, u r prbbly a lsy spllr.
The problem with returning simpler documents is that there is a great demand, from both pushers and users of information, for non-simple documents.
Remember the web started of with very simple documents - which had tags in them that were supposed to have meaning. Who uses (h1) (/h1) any more to mean something about the content - rather than just "I want this in a big font".
R.
Yes I agree that the Internet has caused the demise of the local BBS. Without the local BBS scene anymore hordes of geeks, hackers, and coders around the US have been forced to try an interact with society at large with disastourus results. How is a geek/codes/hacker/technomage supposed to find compatible people of the opposite sex to have meaningful interactions with? Bring back the local BBS scene! Bring back the user meets at the Round Table pizzahouse! Most importantly, bring back gopher! While we are at it, we should resurrect WAIS again too! Take the Lynx source and turn it into a gopher client! If Chewbacca is not from Endor then you must acquitt!
www.nonmundane.org
any company?
the author did mention all "non-commercial sites" for his comparison.
so these companies which have saturated the internet with their bureaucracy and commericalism can still have their without-decent-standards html based www and their petty little banners.
tsia - ah, an expression used much more in BBS days! toodles.
---- I hate fucking Bush - the band, that is.
The attraction of Gopher as a user interface is that it is simple, intuitive and fast. Which was exactly what DoCoMo were looking for when they put iMode together (that's the Japanese mobile phone data service). The result is that although iMode is HTML-based (actually cHTML), the user interface is a Gopher look-alike. There are screen shots available at http://www.wapprofit.com/wapdemo.html The UI works by exploiting the phone's number pad keys; to access numbered links (1-9), just press the appropriate key. This works by a simple HTML extension (). DoCoMo are threatening to roll out iMode in US and Europe, so all you Gopher fans, you may be seeing those numbered lists coming back again sooner than you think.
Yes, it's true. The reason may be nostalgia, but a gopher: URL is sexy. However, I see no reason for the connection between protocols and data types that many posters as well as the manifesto writers make. HTTP can serve plain text data as well as HTML. If you put plain text data on an apache server, the performance and network load will be only marginally worse than with gopher. Every good http server will also be able to generate directory pages automatically if there is is no index.html or equivalent in a directory. Thus, while the HT in HTTP stands for hypertext, gopher-typical contents can be served over HTTP as well.
However, Gopher seems to have one severe problem, namely the data type descriptors. While HTTP users enjoy all the benefits of MIME data types, Gopher allows only single letter descriptors. For all data types that the Gopher makers have not forseen, the data type can at best be guessed from file name extensions or by magic numbers. Gopher+, of course, addresses this problem, but does so in a somewhat artificial way.
To come to a (not all that conclusive) conclusion: On the side of protocols, http has a clear advantage by the incorporation of MIME types. It makes a good deal of sense, however, to serve up information by more that one protocol if the types of information served lend themselves easily to being served in different ways. Why, after all, should the same text file not be available via HTTP, Gopher+, and FTP? On the side of content types, it is certainly true that plain text is underused today althogh it is very suitable for shorter documents that don't make a whole lot of references either within the document or to external documents. HTML is certainly more powerful, and hopefully we will see the standardization of other SGML languages in the future that will provide for better possibilities to mark up things like academic papers semantically. Looking at images, Gopher's native GIF format can probably be considered dead thanks to the strange efforts of Unisys. But it certainly is worthwile to discuss the question whether Gopher should remain in use as a protocol separately from the question of abuses of HTML.
I've posted comments a couple times on Slashdot about resurrecting gopher. Maybe now, people will stop thinking that I'm the sole raving lunatic around here. :^)
Slashdot's first reaction to VMware
> It's relatively hard to load up a news reader to comment on an article rather then just type something into a comment box and press "submit"
:(
That's ridiculous. Iyou're reading a UseNet article, you've already GOT a news reader loaded up to read it. All you have to do is hit whatever letter (or click) to start a reply, click when done.
The interface for reading articles in a well-designed newsreader is about a zillion times better than ANY web-based discussion board interface I've ever seen, and that definitely includes Slashdot. It's a pathetic way to do this. But, there is hope on the horizon in the form of ForumZilla.
Using a webbrowser to read a discussion (whether it's reading a usenet article, or reading a webboard like Slashdot) is about as smart as using a webbrowser as your one and only FTP client. The interface is not designed for, and is definitely NOT optimal for the task at hand. Unfortunately, Slashdot isn't a newsgroup.
alt.slashdot.misc - Yeah!
maybe soc.news-nerds-stuff-that-matters.slashdot.misc
what also confuses me is why we would want to use that sort of function to transfer data (audio/visual). FTP was always there for that, there is some use of HTTP to send large binaries, but mostly it is still done via FTP. That is after all what it was intended for.
I say we stick to the way things are. I don't find the Internet to be as slow as he apparently believes it to be. Change is usually good, but only forward progress... No sense in reverting back to things that were left in the past (for good reason).
funny thing is that the web now has interfaces for NNTP browsing that are in most cases more friendly than most USEnet programs (Deja News emails me my headliners from rec.music.gdead, I don't see 'tin' doing that).
;)
I can search a MASSIVE amount of newsgroups fast w/Deja (and probably google).
Well, whatever, I am done posting my random none-sense
yeah, especially in the number of bytes it takes. now, when it comes to value and interest, it's more like a word is worth half a dozen .gifs. just do a "page info" from netscape on any page on a commercial website, and go through the list of .gifs and .jpgs... most of them are completely uninformative, they're just put there to make the layout "cute" and the page slower.
Calm down people, just use Lynx! I remember the days of gopher, nothing incredibly special about it. I'm much more nostalgic for the local BBS scene.
Scuttlemonkey is a troll
And Captain Stubing, and Isaac, and all the rest of the crew!
Using gopher instead of http is like using nntp instead of slash.
/.'s issues with server stability. Slash turned out to be much better because it's so convenient.
There was a time I thought that perhaps nttp instead of slash would actually be a good idea, specially due to
Gopher isn't convenient at all. Drop it.
Flavio
The thing with gopher was that all the gopher sites were exactly the same. They all had Alice's Adventures in Unix-land, and the CIA World Factbook, and How to Make A Nuke in Your Backyard, and all that crap. Now, of course there's a point to having mirrors, but this made it a little absurd.
Switch the . and the @ to email me.
If you put HTML tags in Gopher documents linking to gopher and http URLs, a web browser would make them into links, right?
So why on earth can't a Gopher document have links?
-------
Vidi, Vici, Veni
There were a lot of good reasons for the web to overtake gopher. So why go back?
:)
When I saw Gopher and the web they weren't that diffrent. Nice clients and easy access to information.
But I could publish my own web pages.. Gopher never really provided that.
So why go back?
Oh sure the web was designed to be expandable etc and it really pushed new vistas. E-Commerce and multimedia.
But look at it today... Multimedia is still a shambles. No web browsers for Unix or Windows that fully support all the web standards. (Notice I'm side stepping Amiga... I've seen some nice work from Amiga web browsers and I suspect they are far more on the ball than Netscape and Microsoft).
To get a decent web browser you may need an Amiga.. A decent web server is a Sun Solarus.
For basic information retreaval that kinda sucks. It shouldn't need much more than the power of an AT&T 3B2 or a i386 and decent clients should be available to at least 90% of the net population (read.. Microsoft Windows.. and Unix.. and Mac.. not Amiga..)
It speaks well for Amiga that it really is the last of the great web client boxes.. I mean.. wow..
Now Unix people don't wish to be pushed into using something other than what they like... Hay Windows people.. you gotta use an Amiga or be cut off from the Net.. how do you feal hmm?? Makes you feal really pissed off don't it?
Amiga people: This is what revenge tasts like...
So.. thats why gopher.
Gopher is stagnent.. It hasn't changed.. Even Netscape makes a decent gopher client.
You can "surf" all of gopher comfortable knowing your client works fine...
Not so when surfing the web...
But gopher is still a step backwards...
But for uniform compatability it can't be beat...
I don't think gopher is the right direction..
The Internet has evolved and the web is really byond limit...
Time for something GNU
I don't actually exist.
Serving up static information reduces its utility enormously. Imagine a book today with footnotes, table of contents and page numbering, bookmarks, index, even ads to future releases. Compare this to say a linear scroll. By embedding links within a document, you enhance the non-linear flow of information, allowing one to fold, search, cross-reference and annote to heart's content. Gopher is more suited to a final frozen output whereas today's modern database backed designs allow greater contentual information (e.g. witness the /. whinge about duplicated submissions).
The real mess comes from the fact that people have been sloppy in not separating the structure from the logic from the links (cough*ASP*cough). But then decent tools will eventual arrive and discipline will rexert itself (hopefully).
LL
There still are lots of BBSs out there. Try telnetting to xgames.dhs.org if you want to play classic door games like BRE and LORD...
funny that it should come up again.
glad to see i was right.
jim
anyone will go-pher it. haha haha.
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
Remember the Law of Software Envelopment: Every program expands until it can read mail. The programs which cannot are replaced by ones that can.
That's a jwz ideal. Back when the Mozilla project had just started (like, a few weeks after it was announced) I was on some sort of general Mozilla mailing list where people could toss around ideas on how the project should go. I suggested immediately that the email client, the newsreader, and that godawful HTML composer should be completely separate from the browser. Well, I should have worn my asbestos underwear 'cause jwz flamed me into ashes with the above italicized Law of Software Envelopment.
I still believe that the ideal program should do one thing and do it well while maintaining harmonious interoperability with other, even dependent, programs. (A separate browser and email client could do this effortlessly and many already do.) Have we forgotten the principles of the Unix philosophy so quickly?
There are a few exceptions where integration is desired... For example, with Napster, the application does the searching, the chatting, and the downloading. However, I still believe that the world wide web and email are completely different entities with literally no relation to each other than the odd anchor tag. Hotmail, el al, are completely different, since your web browser isn't technically the client, the web *server* is.
Sadly, the moderators have stopped paying attention. You had some good stuff here.
And the brethren went away edified.
From gopher://gopher.ptloma.edu/0/gopher/wbgopher
:-) It also supports the gamut of Gopher features,
(of course)
IMPORTANT: Using a web browser to access gopher space
updated 23 August 2000
The majority of you are probably using a web browser to explore Gopherspace.
Happily, most web browsers will still understand Gopher, but they are at
best suboptimal. No major web browser understands Gopher+, for one thing.
Also, Internet Explorer should NOT be used at ALL! (I'll explain presently).
Still, they're the easiest way to access Gopherspace, so here's some help with
using them and deficiencies you need to be aware of.
Lynx is probably the best browser for surfing both the Web and Gopherspace.
It seamlessly shifts between the two, is fast and respectful to servers,
and is the only web browser that recognises GET gopher selectors as web
pages and automatically maps them into URLs. This is more exciting than
it sounds, trust me.
including search servers. The only thing it lacks is Gopher+.
Netscape is acceptable if not spectacular as a gopher client. It doesn't
know how to understand Gopher+ but it's fairly tolerant, and also, like
Lynx, supports the gamut of Gopher features. It isn't that smart with
web URLs masked as Gopher selectors, and it isn't as seamless as Lynx,
but it gets the job done.
Internet Explorer is miserable as a Gopher client, however. It does not
handle the i itemtype correctly, which is used for displaying informational
text; it does not allow access to gopher ports other than 70, which is a
VERY crippling limitation; and worst of all, you can CRASH Internet Explorer
completely, or even Microsoft Web Proxy, by going to any gopher selector
that has a question mark '?' in it. This seems to have been repaired, finally,
in some versions of 5.0 but I still observe this bug from time to time.
There are also some reported problems with using itemtype 7 search servers,
such as Veronica-2, where IExplorer hangs. These deficiencies make Internet
Explorer completely unsuitable for Gopherspace. I have attempted to report
these bugs to Microsoft several times but have been defeated by their tech
support page. The irony is that Internet Information Server still supports
Gopher as one of its protocols. Do NOT use Internet Explorer for any kind
of serious Gopherspace exploration.
The bottom line is that if you intend to do serious exploration of the
world of Gopher, you need a Gopher+ client (some are available here).
But if you're just casually browsing, we recommend Lynx or Netscape.
Send your questions and your suggestions (particularly about other
browsers: how do webTV and Opera fare?) to
gopher@stockholm.ptloma.edu
I've been seeing a LOT of posts that support Gopher because of the lack of support for images and whatnot, but that seems rather silly to me. What exactly is it that keeps an HTTP page from presenting just text? I've been on many different websites that were text only, such as mailing list digests. So what exactly does Gopher provide that makes it superior in this regard? The comments here are highly misdirected, as it isn't in a matter of technology but of design that the problem lies. The only way that switching to Gopher would solve that problem is if Gopher replaced the entire Internet. To be honest, I would rather just let the "Lookee! Its my puppy!" pages remain and have the option of placing diagrams, links and other useful tools within a document.
Deo
Terradot.org: Growing Awareness
I can search a MASSIVE amount of newsgroups fast w/Deja (and probably google).
Very true, but how much would you pay to have NNTP delivered to you over the web?
The only reason deja can do it for nothing is because of a flood of venture capital and the odd ad. How many of these free web services will exist in a few years if they don't start making money some how? (disclaimer: I have no idea if deja is making money or not off it's dejanews banner ads and whatever else they do)
I agree that the infrastructure for http/html is so prevelent that developing applications that use the net in some other way will face a barrier of sorts. However, I think it's silly to expect that every possible application of the networking of the world can be done well using http & html. To wit:
- Napster
- icq
Neither of thse programs use the web and lots of newbies learned how to use it pretty quick.I think the bigger hurdle in getting joe sixpacks to use usenet is convincing them that they might actually want to have long winding conversations/flame wars/debates, stretching over days, weeks & months. I think the answer you'd get from most people, having explained the concept, would be, "What's the point? Why wouldn't I just msg my friends on icq/aim/whatever.."
In addition, to get the most of usenet/fido forums/etc, you have to give *and* take. If no one contributes to the group faq or otherwise engenders a sense of structure, the group dies or falls into chaos. Web based services (i.e. Slashdot) don't have this problem because they can't exist without a central individual/corp serving it up, and that is what provides the focus & structure. I don't know many people outside of the pre-1994 internet/bbs community who would consider maintaining a faq to be a productive use of their time, compared to say, volunteering for the united way or some such.
Who knows - maybe they're right.
As an addendum, the great thing about usenet vs. most web discussion forums (i.e. not usenet via http) is that there is no rush to post in the former. i.e. if I start thinking of something to say, I can spend a few days working on it before posting. In slashdot-land, a few days is death, no one will ever read it and even a few hours is crucial. It makes me rush my posts and that's unfortunate.
When i first joined the internet scene there werent many gopher sites left. But whether it be by Gopher or something else, id like to see more practical pages come around. I really dont like the way the internet is going in some areas. Everyone and their dog seems to have a personal home page full of animated gif's going on about themselves. Espeically a lot of goth webpages on the internet. "Gothic X of the Y" etc. I'm an avid reader of sites like slashdot and tomshardware who provide me with (usually) usefull information than helps or at least affects my daily life.
It's easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them.
Bringing back Gopher is a regressive step - it is old and antiquated, there can be no disagreement with that.
What has happened in the meantime is research and study into hypermedia systems and information structuring, so the intelligent approach is to better organise the raw data, and then make it presentable and useable in different formats. A popular current example is WAP - it should be possbile to use the same information base to create WAP view and a HTML view (and a Java view, and
What the complaint should be about is bad and inappropriate design. There are some cases where it is virtually impossible to find what should be a simple piece of information in a graphically bloated and obscure WWW site.
-- Matthew - matthew.gream@pobox.com, http://matthewgream.net
[The Gopher protocol is] a hell of a lot more simple than HTTP and other protocols of the same line.
Basic HTTP is really simple: "GET /index.html\r\n" and the entire response is the page.
without having to wait for 500000000M of images to load
Then turn off image loading, or use a character-cell browser such as lynx, links, or w3m.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Three words for this: image map navigation. w3m does admirably on *some* of them, but not all.
And the ones it doesn't work on aren't valid HTML either, as HTML requires alt tags wherever there's an image. HTML also recommends a "longdesc" link, which could be used to create a textual version of the image map.
To put it another way: It's the page designer's fault for creating overly complex pages.
Will I retire or break 10K?
We'd no longer need 700Mhz PCs to display all the HTML eyecandy.
I could view a webpage without having to wait a minute for my modem's lights to stop flashing.
This is all very well, but what would happen to the telecommunications industry and chip manufacturers if we didn't have to upgrade CPUs and internet connections every 6 months... Anyway, I'm off to support the economy by installing netscape 6 and another 64 megs.
not_cub
q='echo "q=$s$q$s;s=$b$s;b=$b$b;$q"';s=\';b=\\;echo "q=$s$q$s;s=$b$s;b=$b$b;$q"
so i read the manifesto. i felt the nostalgia. then thought about it for a little while. then went to the gopher links provided in the article and i the same question remained there all the way to this post: WHY?
it would be like bringing back the BBS', betamax or 8Tracks. they were all great at what they did but their time has passed. it's called progress and i do think that the web is way superior to gopher. after all you can do with http/html what you do with gopher and more, using gopher would be like using token ring networks. sure it cures collissions, but at what cost?
just my opinion.
There are two kinds of people in the world: Those with good memory.
Great! I can just imagine the slashdot trolls:
gopher://goatse.cx/
EEW... gopher-goat sex?
---
Can you imagine a beowulf cluster of theese?
Can you imagine a MOSIX cluster of these?
Well, I guess there is always ASCII pr0n...
Friends don't let friends use multiple inheritance.
My personal favourite gopher is the WELLGopher.
Finally, be warned about using gopher in current browsers. Since no one cares about gopher any more, the existing clients are rather crashprone.
and there would be no bandwidth wasted on ads, etc. just pure music.
you would also have to be more than a technology wannabe to get your tunes, of course.
an iron clad way to keep aol, etc goof balls in their play pen.
{smile}
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
That's "Very Easy Rodent-Oriented Net-wide Index of Computerized Archives" for the not-so-elite =).
I send you this message in order to have your advice.
Heh. If you ever use one of the wireless web browsers in Motorola's StarTac and TimePort phones, you'll notice that the interface is basically indistinguishable from gopher. Considering just how many millions of dollars and man-years of wrangling went into finalizing and building the WAP spec, I can't find this anything but amusing. Forward...into...the past!
News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters? Like hell.
Gopher did have hyperlinks -- they were merely listed at the bottom instead of randomly through the text. Normally you'd go to one by pressing a corresponding number on the keyboard
There's no "we" in team, only "me"
Searches don't work, and you can't use proxies (now I'm finished exams those are the next feature), but the rest of standard gopher works fine.
I was thinking... gopher would be great for accessability and wireless.
Then I started thinking some more. Why not just use the standards used to represent inforamtion to wireless browsers to send information to the handicapped and to those of us who would prefer (so very much) to see content rather than flash.
A keyboard-controlled web with a standard UI and no gawdy graphics.
Maybe somebody could create a gopher gateway... if you can't parse HTML cleanly for this purpose, there is no way that disabled populations have full access to the Internet.
Here is the original documentation on gopher.
John 17:20
I remember useing Gopher, although it was after HTTP was takeing over.
I prefer Gopher for one reason: I get to the information faster, and don;t have to deal with all the ads and glitz of the WWW.
HTML and the WWW are becomeing increaseingly useless when it comes to quickly getting information, and reviveing Gopher would be a GREAT way to counteract this.
Gopher isn;t hard to use, and it's faster. I'll take a FUNCTIONAL Internet over the HTML monstrosity we now have. (although Slashdot is great)
-Marchie
~Donald / Just RTFM
Like most of the comments I've read seemed to indicate, I also considered gopher to be an outdated protocol. However, I said what the hell, there might be something interesting out there, and clicked on some of the links.
So after wading through various gopher servers from various universities that I've never heard of, I found myself reading about multithreaded routing protocols, papers on linguistics, and other various research topics.
Then it dawned on me. Hey! This is what the internet used to be like! Some sysadmin saying "email me if you want to upload something here". Research papers that I don't understand. Wierd stuff that I would never expect to find anywhere else.
I don't know how it happened, but the wierd stuff that made the internet for me seems to have disappeared over the years. You have the over commercialized stuff, and you have the various weblogs (slashdot et al), and you have the orgs, but rarely do you find research, odd software that you aren't sure would still work on modern hardware as well as the assumption that everyone reading this has a Sparc and would need x11 for a sparc, explanations of AFS, etc, etc....
I know for some people, they simply aren't interested, they don't have time to just explore and read random things, but those of us who remember when you could go five clicks on the web and be reading more about archaeology than you ever wanted to know, well, here it is again.
I recommend these gopher pages to any kid who has curiousity about what one might find on the internet. Brings back the old days of "whoa, there is a lot to learn in this world" feelings.
Someone else compared it to the BBS scene. Yeah, kinda like, similar era, but most of what I saw on gopher is more academic than that. I'd still recommend the modern day BBS scene to those who are looking for wierd stuff, though.
Sure, I remember Gopher, and it was swell. I also pine for the days of HTML 2.0 -- bullet lists on gray backgrounds, you could download them in reasonable time on your 14.4k modem. A return to minimalism would be welcome in this age of high-bandwidth schlock.
But look, anytime someone publishes a "manifesto" to preserve or resurrect some technology, particularly an Internet technology, you know that their time is almost over for good. If you want to see Gopher come back, then bring it back by publishing information on Gopher that readers will want to see. These things stand or fall on the choices of all those Internet users out there, and if your beloved technology is really as good as you say, they'll come and get it. Just imploring everyone to use it will never be good enough. It's usually a sign that you're losing the argument.
Always keep a sapphire in your mind
How long would it take to port the slashdot code to gopher? ^_^
This protocol doesn work in Netscape 6.0 anymore. Guess AOL finally made it "Just to easy".
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Perversely greped and groped by PowerPenguin
THINK ABOUT ALL THE BITS WE COULD SAVE BY NOT HAVING TO DISTINGUISH BETWEEN A LITTLE "c" AND A LARGE "C".
n.b. Cool a troll started by Hemos himself...
On the second point (data wasn't very formatted), I'd argue that while documents were plain ASCII, the meta-data/navigation had much better formatting than equivilant web navigation. For awhile, I hated using lynx over gopher, as with lynx the navigation choices could be scattered throughout paragraphs of arbitrary text. With gopher, on the other hannd, it was always a simple menu that could be navigated by entering the number of your choice.
Overall, though, I agree with you that there's not a compelling need to bring back gopher back to the mainstream. What I would like to see, however, is a the addition of a gopher-like menuing structure into the native capabilities of HTML (i.e. something a little more powerful than just a frame with a bunch of anchor tags).
Yes, I more-or-less agree with this. I think that gopher is unlikely to make a comeback for for precisely that reason... compared to today's all-singing, all-dancing websites with 50000Mb of graphics or whatever gopher just doesn't look appealing. It looks, well, technical. That, and the fact that you need to have slightly more Clue to be using it in the first place.
.sig, Sir, but, ummm, the dog ate it.
Now, I myself am quite happy to use gopher / lynx / nntp / other nice things, but the fact is that however much we want to deny it, the vast majority of internet users are now fairly clueless / computer-illiterate people using the browser -- IE -- that happened to come preinstalled on their windows computer (after days of lessons from their 12-year-old child) and hell, probably OE for email. And I know it's sometimes considered flamebait around here to remind people that masses of people use Win/IE, but they do. And most of these people are never going to use nntp because it's something else that would need to be explained to them, and requires scary things like new programs etc to use, which they don't have time to learn about.
And it's all very well saying "sod them, they don't deserve to be on the net anyway" or such things, but places like slashdot, or better, Yahoo Communities and co., prove that these people are still human, still have interesting contributions to make, and by designing a pretty message board around the web that they can just about work out how to use, you can get many, many more people joining in, and certainly much wider cross-sections of people contributing etc, than you would with a newsgroup. And that's what makes them really "rock the kazbah".
That's why I'm slightly worried that the "bring back gopher campaign" is equivalent to us techies saying "sod today's average internet user, let's deliver content via a (wince) obscure protocol that your average windows luser won't want / know how to access and thus won't be able to benefit from".
Dave
--
I did have a
If you go and read the Gopher Manifesto (whic is a text document) it contains many URLs which are probably very interesting, but I have to cut-and-paste them if I want to go to them!
Sorry, but I'll put up with the mega sized HTML documents if it gives me the useful ability to move quickly between document by clicking a link!
(Minor celebrity note.. I wrote the unix gopher client and server looooong ago.)
...master, I didn't call myself gophermaster for nothing... :-)
.gif crack-addict you could never go back to the simple world of menu oriented gophers...
Gopher may be relaxing in the retirement home, but it has spawned many offspring...
* Linking between servers (what it's not all on one box!)
* Linking multiple services together -- Gopher supported Telnet, TN3270, and CSO PH servers as basic types.
* It put the internet in non-techies hands. All those people with a Mac+ could use it. People with cheap 286 PCs could use it. It was simple -- at the time FTP, telnet and such were not.
* Gopher 'greased the skids' by making an infosystem work well in spite of slow computers, slow modems. The web would not be where it is today without Gopher.
* It provided the first infosystem based full-text search engines, which used NeXT's text indexing technology, and later on linked WAIS.
* Liberalized publishing. Gopher servers could run on cheap Macs and PCs. Most of the early gopher-space was on machines not normally thought of as servers.
* The suffix
In the end, Mosaic 'embraced and extended' Gopher. Once the you became a
WWJD -- What Would Jimi Do?
WWJD -- What Would Jimi Do?
(Smash amp, burn guitar, take home the groupies)
The gopher systems I remember were much better at finding quality information than the web when you knew what you were looking for, but the web is much better at finding some information on a topic when you're not sure what exactly you need. And porn, of course.
I can't see why there isn't room for both, or why a Gopher client couldn't display an HTML document with it's formatting intact, as a user option. After all, once the Gopher has found a document it's up to the user agent to display that doc in a suitable format.
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
even though this guy has valid points (I am not so sure about a 10k% increase in speed) I don't particularly like the idea of a return to Gopher. We moved away from Gopher for a reason. It was UGLY, it was UGLY, and it was OLD and UGLY. Yes, the Internet was ugly then, but Gopher looks much better in past thought.
;-)
.02 for tonight.
The Internet is in an evolutionary stage. We started out w/old stuff and moved to much prettier things. Yes, Gopher could do the same sort of things, but honestly why change what works (they never do).
Let's continue to shoot the Gopher rather than just flush it out w/water so it can come back
Just my worthless
I'm actually quite surprised that most of the responses to this thread have been an offhanded slight. The Gopher system is a very well designed system. It was a solidly built way to share files without opening your network to the security risks of NFS or ftp. It toted a heirarchical organization of information for network wide distribution. And it originated at the University of Minnesota (um..."gopher"... the University mascot?).
Interesting Links
- Gopher RFC
- UMN's Gopher Info site
- UMN's ftp gopher directory
So, if you'd like to see how we did it in the "old days", take a look.assert(expired(knowledge));
Sheesh!
And the brethren went away edified.
I remember the days before the web was anything to sneeze at. I remember the days when gopher ruled. It was extremely handy for me to get FTP access on a system that didn't support it, without needing to resort to FTP mail.
But face it, nobody is going to spend real money on it. The way I look at it, there are a lot of reasons why Gopher died.
Really, I look to Gopher as the forerunner of the web. It had to die for the web to take off.
Now, there are arguments that it would be a great information retreval protocal for wireless or other usages. However, IMHO, by the time that you actually build a product around this, you will have the processing power in your personal item for HTML or WML and WAP or HTTP. Furthermore, with either of those protocalls, you have a much richer method of interaction from the user, where the user can submit a form instead of just one search field.
I think that Gopher will always have some sort of a niche, like the people who still do hacking on Apple II computers. It's the same sort of people. The Apple II, IMHO, could have been the Worlds Greatest Computer had things turned out differently. It's great for hacks and research projects and goofing. But Gopher will never stage a comeback.
Gentoo Sucks