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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.
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Like most of the comments I've read seemed to indicate, I also considered gopher to be an outdated protocol.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.
You forgot about the two most hideous tags, SCRIPT and APPLET... IMG tags lead to SCRIPT tags, SCRIPT tags lead to APPLET tags, APPLET tags lead to suffering...
Any sufficiently advanced man is indistinguishable from God
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.
Exactly!!
HTTP/HTML has been butchered and raped by commercial interests so much that it's now nothing but an unecessarily bloated mutant of what it ought to have been. For goodness' sake, HTML stands for HyperText markup language! What the h*** is that IMG tag doing there? And all the other monstrosities like EMBED, WIDTH and HEIGHT attributes, ad nauseum. But no, because of the big bucks behind this monster, nobody cares to think about how sensible (or idiotic) it has become. If only they realized how inefficient HTML is for the kind of things it's used for these days.
IMNSHO, if you want multimedia, use a protocol designed to handle multimedia! I don't see the logic behind multimedia on a text protocol. (Or what used to be a text protocol.)
But this is just the trees. To take a step back and look at the forest. What is the Web intended to be originally? It's supposed to be a source of information. And no, contrary to what today's couch potatoes might think, flashing images and animations are not information. They are eye-candy. If you want eye-candy, there is cable TV available. Or computer games, if you want something more interactive.
Information is best conveyed by text, in most cases. And in cases where other formats are more appropriate, they can usually be treated as secondary content (ie., as auxilliary data files that you can download). The front-end interface is most efficient as text -- text to index the non-text content.
OK, sorry for this long rant, but my point is (was), the revival of gopher is by no means a nostalgia for the "good ol' days". There is a lot of reason why people that don't have dainbramage would rather not waste bandwidth by visiting a graphic-overloaded website, but by visiting something like gopher, where you can find and get the information you want without having to wade through all the noise and muck.
(Flamesuit on, flame away :-P)
Poll Mastah
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