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.
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...
Interestlingly enough, Citadel BBSes started in the twin cities.
But wait, where in the world did Gopher start, serverwise? The first one I remember was boombox.micro.umn.edu
(or was it consultant.?)
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."
blegh, stupid lameness filter doesn't recognize sarcasm. so I'm just gonna downcase this and you can imagine that it's typed in ALL-CAPS
not only that, but we should even go
back to using 40-character column widths
then we won't have to worry about if the
person reading has an 80-column card
installed. this is really how things are
supposed to be. and while we're at it,
let's stop using all these fancy
characters like backslash and tilde.
they really mess up a lot of terminals.
and those old things are the best way to
access a computer. none of these fancy
svga graphics and multiple windows.
pdp-8 all the way, baby! woo-hoo!!!
Any sufficiently advanced civilization is indistinguishable from Gods.
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".
-----------------------------------------
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