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Bring Back Gopher Campaign

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the return-of-the-rodent dept.

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.

5 of 189 comments (clear)

  1. I remember using Gopher... by garcia · · Score: 5

    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.

    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 .02 for tonight.

  2. Surprised! by runswithd6s · · Score: 5

    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

    So, if you'd like to see how we did it in the "old days", take a look.
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    assert(expired(knowledge)); /* core dump */
  3. Self-Documenting Inconvenience by CaptainCarrot · · Score: 5
    The Manifesto itself demonstrates why online documents without links are a pain. Look at that list of documents at the end. (Interestingly, only two of them are gopher sites; the rest are http or nntp.) Wouldn't it be convenient to be able to just click on one of them and have the referenced document delivered to your browser? And here they're citing the lack of links within documents as an advantage.

    Sheesh!

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    And the brethren went away edified.
  4. Re:Alternative by PollMastah · · Score: 5

    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)

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    Poll Mastah

  5. Bring back gopher? Not necessarily... by cmowire · · Score: 5

    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.

    • Personal publishing wasn't easily available. Remember that one of the main reasons why the web took off was because personal pages were easy to create with the httpds that were out there.
    • The data wasn't very formatted. In those days, that was good, but, like it or not, today we need more than ASCII text.
    • The web won the adaptability war. You can do things with the web infrastructure that it wasn't designed for -- Like slashdot, for example. Remember the Law of Software Envelopment: Every program expands until it can read mail. The programs which cannot are replaced by ones that can. Well, you can now read mail with the web infrastructure much better than the Gopher infrastrucre could have been.
    • With the web, we can do business stuff, professional stuff AND personal stuff. Gopher was good for professional research and some limited personal stuff -- mostly supplied by wiretap.spies.com.
    • With tables and HTML, we can present more information in a more compact format than ASCII text. And with graphics, we can communicate an idea more with more visual compactness. Gopher was too built around ASCII text terminals.

    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.

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    Gentoo Sucks