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When was the Last Time You Used Gopher?
ahuber asks: "As part of a class for LIS 391 @ the University of Illinois, I'm doing a history of the gopher protocol. My intent in this is to track the rise and fall of old technologies in hope that it tells us something about technologies we use today. So, my question to you is: When was the last time you used a gopher server? What did you use it for? And finally, do you miss the gopher now that its virtually gone? While some of you may think this is a silly topic, old and useful technologies are going the way of Gopher every day. One example from my campus is the retiring of the newsgroup server and telnet. Do you have any similar experiences that made you think twice about giving up an older technology?"
Was when I wrote the "Atomic Mp3 Finder" about 2 months before Napster came out.
It was a piece of shit, as I was still new to development, but was fun, and I learned a TON.
The last time I clearly remember using gopher was in 1995. I was using OS/2 Warp at the time, and was downloading drivers from one of the IBM labs.
I do not miss it. I can barely remember what it looked like...
Are there any benifits of Gopher over http/html at all?
I was really bored one day and tried to go to gopher.wiretap.spies.com, which I remember was a popular place on Gopher... in the last century. However it doesn't seem to exist any more. Are there any gopher servers left? I suspect the answer is yes, but I don't know where to find them.
Jeez, I last used a gopher client nine years ago, when I was an incoming frosh in college and had no idea what http, ftp, or gopher meant. I recall that at the time, people were still using gopher for researching things, but that was quickly tapering off. We all were starting to use web search engines like infoseek or lycos or altavista (or was that more recent) to do research for school projects.
0- Eamonman Proud member of DNRC
I was testing out mozilla's gopher:// handler. It actually works :)
I was working on Gopher pages for the University Computer Club at UWA over 10 years ago now. Can't say that I miss it. HTML/HTTP is everything Gopher was and so much more.
I think the only time I used Gopher was when I was a student back at the University of Minnesota (whose mascot, the Golden Gopher, provided the inspiration for the protocol's name for those at the U of M who developed it). I think that was 1992 or '93.
It didn't really make too much of an impression on me, though. I dimly remember that is was a very rigidly hierarchical menu-based system, difficult to use if you didn't know where in the hierarchy to look. But that's about all I remember.
Wikipedia has a good article on Gopher.
I was working for the meteorology department on campus and building a tool to slurp up weather data from every known source imaginable, including web and ftp sites, McIDAS(*shudder* I HATED THAT THING) and GOPHER! I think out of the 50 or so sources I was using only 1 or 2 used gopher. AFAIK gopher is probably still used in meteorology.
Thoughts on tech, Software Engineering, and stuff
Gopher seemed very antiquated since this new HTML thing allowed you to do the same stuff as Gopher, but also format it, use different text sizes and WOW... pictures. We downloaded this thing called Netscape and opened a text editor and went at it. Anyone at the school that had a "Computer" account could post these so called "web pages" to their personl storage space. It was a very generous amount of space too, 2 MB. We were amazed, we could put almost two 3 1/4 floppies worth of useless stuff there for everyone to see.
Fear Is the Only God
in 1996 was the last time I used a gopher server. Also 1996 was the first time I'd used a gopher server. To me (an enlisted soldier in the US Army) the internet was a brand new thing for me and I used everything I could get my hands on. I'd just dumped AOL (yeah, yeah, I was an AOL'er for a year, and that's when they charged per minute) for this internet thing.
I remember that the gopher program for my Mac Colour Classic had a gopher in a really nifty pair of sunglasses. But it turns out I just didn't gopher very much -- Archie and/or Veronica (am I remembering right?) found everything I needed on FTP, and this is when the web was getting popular -- my first browser was Mosaic.
All this, and I'm a relative late starter to the internet compared to most of the /. crowd (and an really early adopter in my own crowd).
--Jim (me)
There's a fantastic archive at gopher.quux.org . I don't think there's anything there which isn't accessible on the Web, but it's nice to see something useful on Gopher.
The best thing about this site is that it's still accessible when our shonky Web cache breaks. If you're incapable of doing any work without the Web, at least you can read Project Gutenberg, the Jargon File, or the Internet Oracle archives from here.
(BTW: there are a few broken selectors on this site at the moment; unfortunately some of the most useful stuff. Hopefully it'll be fixed soon.)
Is that an IM protocol/system/whatever?
Suggestion: Don't waste your time blathering on about assumptions you know are assumptions. Verify your assumption (googling "gopher server" comes to mind). Else you look like an idiot.
I've never used gopher myself (other than for seeing what it looked like), but you may all want to check out Floodgap Gopher-HTTP Proxy
And yes, you do need a proxy, as just about all modern browsers (yes, even Mozilla) don't render gopher correctly - compare your browser with what it should look like.
And naturally, the proxy links to lots of still-existent gopherspaces, for all you wondering if there are any still out there...
Some people on a local board I visit were complaining about inflamatory threads being deleted, cencorship, and all that... so I was searching for good info on Canadian Defamation law, and found this:
gopher://insight.mcmaster.ca/11/org/efc
Gave me the creeps.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
It's been about 7 years since I've had a reason to use Gopher (a couple local colleges used it).
'bout two weeks ago. One those "wonder if it's still working" momemnts. Any interesting gopher:// URLS out there?
So much to do, so little bandwidth.
--
Try Mozilla
I believe I was able to download schedule information on classes, etc. from our university gopher server. Thats about all I ever used it for.
I was home for the summer and wanted to check my mail, but we didn't have an ISP (back in 1995). So I called in to my local library's system, which they put out so you could use databases and stuff remotely. They allowed you to get into Gopher from there. I dug around until I found a telnet gateway and used that to log into my college account all summer. The tricky part was that there was no way to directly go to an address, by typing in a URL or something. So you had to follow links all the way from my little library's server in NJ to this gateway in Germany or something.
For the first (and probably last) time I used it to look at gopher://sdf.lonestar.org/. I was mostly curious and found the gopher site through Vivisimo It's pretty cool and works great over dialup. I used Mozilla Firebird 0.7 to access it.
> One example from my campus is the retiring of the newsgroup server and telnet.
Okay, see, gopher being retired is one thing - we have a superior (far superior) replacement. There _is_ no obviously-superior replacement for NNTP yet, and the only superior replacement for telnet is secure telnet.
The interfaces of web forum software are still leagues behind that of a decent NNTP client, and what are you going to do when you need the functionality of telnet?
Bizarre decision.
Last time I successfully used gopher was college ('96). I have tried a few times recently because gopher was a little more precise than google or the like.
Archie is the tool I miss the most though. Need a file, know the filename, archie will find a dozen places that the file exists. Now you are tied to ad-supported search sites that make you jump through hoops to download a file from another ad-supported site that makes you jump through more hoops!
Data is disappearing off the net, and the data that is still there is becoming impossible to find because of the search engine rankings. Give me the raw data and let me do the ranking. I am the one that knows what I'm looking for.
I was testing out mozilla's gopher:// handler. It actually works :)
Actually, no it doesn't - try comparing this gopher link with this html proxied version - not the same, I think you'll agree.
Doubtless someone will come up with a whole list, so please be gentle with the mods, but I managed to find one Gopher site (viewing with Moz Firebird):
gopher://gopher.umsl.edu/
Ok, I'll admit that I sort of went directly from BBSs to Netscape (the one with the giant pulsing "N", and hasn't it all been downhill from there...) about - what was it? - '96?
Consequently I never used gopher. Can someone save me the time of actually looking it up and tell us what the heck it did?
Or Archie and Veronica for that matter?
Three Squirrels
First began using Gopher in 1993. By 1995, the Web had taken over and Gopher was pretty much obsolete. However, Columbia's ColumbiaNet intranet system, obviously based on Gopher, didn't convert to a Web-based system until 1998 or so. So I can say I last used Gopher then.
Feburary 2nd
No... wait... that was a ground hog, not a gopher.
Sorry.
--Phillip
Can you say BIRTH TAX
I was comparing finding data using that new-fangled Mosilla, verses Gopher. I remember Gopher being very obtuse and switched to Mosilla.
Bad User. No biscuit!
I was using gopher some 3 months ago. Believe it or not, a university was still using it for their people search! I can't recall who it was. Although, around a year ago, Macalester College was using it for their people search. heh.
:)
ahhh, gopher. I used to use it a ton. Back in the day, the U of MN would run a free gopher client service into which you could telnet. I used to know of an 800 number that when dialed would just yield a telnet> prompt... Must've been for some companies agents in the field or something. But between the magick telnet> and the free gopher client, I was a very happy 12 year old! Mind you, this was back in 1992, far before most of you whipper snappers got a copy of Netscape 3.0 (GOLD!@$) from your ISPS.
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
Remember Archie? That was one of the first things I ever used to batch download porn. Ahhh, sunet.se...the memories.
I don't use UUCP anymore because...well, it's UUCP, and I don't use Fido anymore simply because everyone's left the boards of old - and the only people left are the people who seem to make it "Fightonet".
This sig no verb.
You mean that damn *mumble mumble* gopher isn't dead yet? I thaught I gawt im wiph dah bunny c-4. That does it, I'm getting mydoom's gophinator 3000 and ending this once and for all. god damn *mumble mumble* gopher ruining my gauf course.
The thing I miss most about gopher is that you got to say that you were the "gophermaster" -- that's gotta be 5x cooler than "webmaster" any day.
My firends call me The Gopher... I use myself all the time... but I was not aware I had a server.
Where can I get more info about my server????
My last Gophering of any consequence was around 1995-1996. Edmunds.com had a fantastic Gopherspace packed with tons of info on automobiles, mainly for educating yourself when buying a new or used vehicle. The gem was the list of exact dealer invoice costs on new cars, broken down for every option, trim level, etc. They really were just plain text files arranged by maker on the site, but they presented so much more information than Edmunds' current typical ad-laden web site. I'd like to see if they still have any such information in such a comprehensive format.
gopher://up-root.org I use it to list my images and crap that I would rather not have my real friends seeing. :|
:|
I'm in my late 20's, am a programmer, have been on the internet since about 1994, have been involved with computers since about 1983 and have never used GOPHER. Period.
I'd have to say it was 1995...I think I was procuring some software for my calculus class.
My lack of God, it's Trotsky!
I just used mozilla gopher and checked out the link. And what do I see?
s id=90355&ci d=7797473
gopher://up-root.org/I9/sole/img/worksshot.jpg
A post I wrote on slashdot in some random screenshot of someone's desktop. 'Why buy an ipod'. I posted it anonymously so I can't prove it, but I know I wrote it...
The original:
http://apple.slashdot.org/comments.pl?
"When was the Last Time You Used Gopher?"
When Ma ran out of possum.
"Derp de derp."
i'm using usenet right now, i've been using it since i first subscribed to an isp in 1995ish.
it's a sig, wtf?
My first internet account was on a unix freenet called Nyx, which was run by a guy named Andrew Burt at Denver University.
When I first started to use my account, I could dial a local university number, and connect to a telnet prompt. There wasn't even any authentication.
Eventually they closed that down, but kept access to the library card catalogue open to the public. You could use the card catalog to get to the gopher tree, and from there I could find a telnet link to Nyx.
I downloaded my first linux distro using kermit through a telnet connection opened via gopher. It was the old MCC distro, which came on a series of floppy disks.
For me, gopher was more of a means than an end in itself. I didn't spend a lot of time reading stuff on gopher. I did search for telnet links to nyx, which were always moving around (or getting shut down).
I don't miss gopher at all, because you can think of a gopher menu as a special case of a web page. Every gopher menu can be expressed as a web page, and of course web pages can do lots of stuff that gopher menus can't.
The first wave of consumer or hobbyist internet use was focused on shell accounts, many of which were on netcom -- you'd dial in with a terminal program, so you didn't have a tcp/ip stack on the computer you were sitting at, and nothing was graphical. Gopher worked well in that world, because it was something that a terminal program could handle.
The listserve list I'm an admin for used to have its archives on gopher; they finally bumped them off in about June or July.
I used it to look for a job...which I got. I was a cabler (installed CAT5 cable) on my college campus. That job helped me get a job in the computer repair shop on campus which helped me get a job as a custom computer assembly tech at a local computer store which helped me get a job in an IT department at a larger corporation which helped me get a job as a programmer where I am today. So you could say that gopher is responsible for my entire career :)
I hope, as part of your tracking the history, you learn something about statistical sampling. Hint: polling slashdot is NOT a valid sample from which you can draw any meaningful conclusion.
You can tell a great deal about the character of a man by observing those who hate him.
I found out about gopher in 1993 when I was in 7th grade, shortly after I got a UNIX account. This was back when I was fascinated by cd ..; ls, so my standards were not exactly mountainous. This was before everyone had heard of the Internet, so gopher impressed me by delivering The Adventures of Huck Finn, Kanji Character of the Day, and e to 50,000 digits (which I downloaded to floppy and took home!). I didn't know about bookmarks, so I'd try to remember the hop-by-hop path to my favorite servers.
In the fall of 1995, when I was a sophomore in high school, I wrote an essay about the Web in which I listed browser protocol compliance (http, ftp, gopher, and even wais!) as a major feature. I think the last time I used Gopher was in 1996 while searching the 'net for something school related. I think the site may have been down, but I at least felt like I was using my old friend the rodent again.
Back in that same day, I'd always try and fail to get something cool from archie. Almost without fail, the search would turn up nothing or it would turn up lots of results, none of which pointed to sites that would let me in.
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
three years ago for a civics project, I used the CIA world factbook on gopher.
10 years ago, using gopher on sunos at netcom.com
I read some of the posts and the wikipedia entry and started thinking..
I've been looking for a secure way to have preproduction versions of my bands recordings online. FTP is ok, but most people have access to a client and guessing a url is not hard. If I could set up a gopher server with the data there and instruct whoever needed access that they would have to install either mozilla or a special client to get it, they could. Also since most people don't even know gopher exists they could do very little with the mailed out url even if they got it. It wont work in IE.
Thoughts, Questions?
The / in
(Granted, many (most?) are using it for porn and warez, but that was probably true 10 years ago too.)
As for telnet, ssh is much more like telnet than WWW is like gopher. I doubt many people lament the loss of telnet access (it having been replaced with ssh) ... but going from gopher to the WWW is a very different transition. WWW is everything that gopher wasn't, but gopher had a certain charm that escapes most of the WWW.
As for when I last used gopher? A few weeks ago, actually. Somebody mentioned it, and I wondered if browsers still supported it (I remember how Mosaic would support it) ... and Mozilla does!
I am 22 and have only heard of gopher. Never tried it or even seen it.
Choosing the lesser of two evils is a choice for evil.
When I started at Case a lot of the course materials were on gopher. Of course, mozilla, etc. came out very soon after (I remember running it my freshman year), so it was a very brief time spent with gopher.
Derek
Don't Panic...
I used to use gopher quite a bit in 1991-1993. By 1994, gopher use had almost ended, replaced by http. I didn't touch gopher again until a specific problem came up in late 1997. I haven't used it since then until tonight (and I'm having a great time poking around, the mozilla gopher client still works).
What I don't understand is why your sniversity is getting rid of UseNet. Dejagoogle might be ok for archival searches, but there is certainly a place for newsgroups in an academic setting. Slashdot and kuro5hin are about the closest web apps have come to duplicating the community feeling of UseNet, and that is not saying much. I spend a couple hours per week catching up on a wide variety of news in about 12 newsgroups. Without that quick update, I'd soon feel very left behind in my field. There is no place on the web where you can ask very technical questions, and have a good chance some technical expert has seen your problem before and can help solve your problem. UseNet is invaluable for people who have real jobs requiring lots of additional information.
Will your sniversity be a leader in trashing soon-to-be-obsolete protocols and block port 80 at the firewall next year? Or will they just make the logical next step and eliminate internet access, telephones, and all electrical appliances?
the AC
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on
Anyway, our university's web-based ph search tool used gopher and ph was the most complete phone/email database on campus, so I would use it occasionally. Unfortunately, Netscape 4.7 was the only browser at the time that could still do gopher, but I was on *nix machines, so this wasn't a big issue since that was the interim where we *nix folks didn't have any decent browsers.
The university has since moved to LDAP. So, 2001 was the last time I used gopher "for real", not for testing or playing.
I'm not really into pictures with bullshit site- and phonesex ads on them, but if the web is your choice...
Boobdex.com is a good start.
And I like the amateur pages at Voyeurweb. I get lots of goodness from Coolio's Babelog as well.
You might also spend some quality time at Domai or Kindgirls, which both have much free goodness.
If you're willing to put your money where your mouth is, Hegre-Archives is awesome, as are Quantum Proadult and Met Art. Playboy's CyberClub can keep a downloader busy for weeks.
Hardcore really isn't my area of interest, but holy crap, if you're even making jokes about pr0n, regular slashdotter NineNine has just the site for you
I use scripts to grab most of my smut, but I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the Mozilla extensions Linky and Magpie which combine to make my life as a pr0n browser much more pleasant.
-- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K
It was the time I caught the ferry over to Shelbyville. I needee a heel for my shoe, so I decided to go to Morganville, which is what they called Shelbyville in those days. So I tied an onion to my belt, which was the style at the time. Now to take the ferry cost a nickel, and in those days, nickels had pictures of bumblebees on them. 'Give me five bees for a quarter' you'd say. Now where were we?
Good luck with your research.
BTW, for those reminiscing about text-based gopher don't forget GopherVR that came out just as http/html hit. An interesting experiment in 3D virtualization of online resources I've yet to see it equalled for other protocols.
Other now-obscure technologies from the same era:
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
Bug number 2903's creation date is 2000-01-31.
...was when Slashdot ran a story called "Whatever Happened to Gopher?" on July 2nd, 2000.
I had been working on a C++ version of gopherd and gopher back then. UMinn legal pulled a nasty one on loyal users and contributors: if you were a commerical user or coming from a .com domain, you have to pay us. They claimed to own the protocol so even separate development would cost. It wasn't based on what you did with it or what you added to it like most of today's open source licenses, just the "color" of your domain. Definitely an open license moving to a closed license.
The commerical-academic-government balkanization was quite strong on the internet back then. No advertising allowed. You had to be careful about regular discussion sometimes (Will this post be seen as an innocent "product support" answer or would it perceived as disallowed commercial speech?). A lot of the nostalgic "gentility" of the old Internet was due to this kind of self-censorship.
At the time the web seemed more (and unnecessarily) complicated as a technology (remember we had just ftp, telnet, usenet and e-mail to compare it against). However, more importantly, there were no 2nd class citizen clauses on the license unlike gopher+.
The UMinn license changes pushed me to research web and html further, which I might not have done otherwise - which was financially rewarding a few short years later. I know other folks had a similar reaction and experience. I shutdown all my gopher servers and converted the content to html.
anyone remember spies.wiretap.org it was almost as good as the bbs days. that was the last time I used gopher.
Mozilla Firebird 0.7 works just fine. The only difference is that it puts a giant honking message at the top to tell you it's a Gopher page, whereas the proxy puts links at the bottom to link back to the proxy.
If anyone cares, I can put up a screenshot, but I really suggest you just go actually download Mozilla before you run your mouth. (Or is this firebird only?)
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
and I repeat, google for: define: gopher
I don't claim I know more than I know, and if you know you know more than I know, then by all means, let me know.
Up until 2002, the final exams schedule at my university were only available through gopher. Oh, and to register for classes, you had to call that incredibly sucky automated phone system that really did NOT like you interrupting it by pressing numbers before being told to. They finally upgraded that ancient piece of crap system, now everything is done through the web.
For several reasons;
:)
:)
;p
- Nostalgia
- Viewing status/summary and log files on servers I admin (pages generated by dayly/weekly/monthly cron scripts).
- Since it is not part of the usual ports used on servers, it doesn't generate much traffic, esp. if you restrict the IPs with access.
Yes I know, this could easyly be done in HTTP/SSH*/etc, but it still works fine as it is
* Used for sensitive log/info, though.
Remember kids, security is not a toy.
--
Honk if you like my spelling.
Carbon based humanoid in training.
I used Gopher to get classes in college. Without it, it would have been nearly impossible to get into the high-demand classes!
This was at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, between 1992 and 1998.
A friend of mine showed me the basic technique, and I wrote some scripts to do it.
Every hour, the school updated the list of classes that were open, and published them via Gopher. Classes were full, but because people added and dropped classes constantly during the frantic first week or so of each quarter, high-demand classes would occasionally open up.
I made a script that called the Gopher client with the equivalent of "lynx --dump" every hour, and grepped that for classes I needed. If it found a match, it emailed me. If I checked my email often enough, I had a chance. Back then, the dream was to have an emailable pager, so you wouldn't be tied to checking email! I never did get around to rigging up a more complicated setup to use an analog modem to dial an old-style numeric pager, but some people did.
Without Gopher, I might still be there, trying to get the one or two critical classes needed to graduate...!
Dr. Demento On The 'Net!
Somebody thinks I have prior art, and I had to be deposed this summer. One of the things we did was run a decade-old version of Gopher for Windows.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
I don't miss gopher at all, because you can think of a gopher menu as a special case of a web page. Every gopher menu can be expressed as a web page, and of course web pages can do lots of stuff that gopher menus can't.
Conclusion does not necessarily follow.
The guarantee that functionality is within a subset has value in and of itself.
Gopher links are a single column of text without frames. I can easily navigate a gopher system with just a single hand on the arrow keys while munching a sandwich. Heck, an NES controller would be sufficient. That cannot be done on the Web, because there are no such constraints on design.
I do miss gopher, but there's a reason that it went away. It wasn't notably better than http for most things. The protocol and setup was more complex than they should be, and the code wasn't necessarily written with security in mind.
I *still* miss archie and used it up until a year or so ago when the final public archie server went down. Archie was, for legitimate files, something on the order of eDonkey. You needed a file, a server was slow, you found a better one. However, almost everyone made files that might be needed available via FTP. Few files are placed on eDonkey -- if I want to download an arbitrary file, there's a good chance that I can't get it with eDonkey. There is a Web-based archie-style FTP interface that used to be based in Norway and now appears to be part of alltheweb.com that I use occasionally, but it seems that even the day of FTP is slowly drawing to a close -- Apple has shut down their vast FTP archives, and more and more people just use HTTP servers.
The passing of finger will be missed. It really doesn't make sense in this less-trusting world on the Internet today, but I remember that it was incredibly valuable for trying to help get ahold of someone in an emergency.
I do still remember that first day when I found gopher, and was told that I could use it for free. I clicked "Other Gopher Servers", and a list came up: "North America", "South America", "Australia", etc. Doesn't seem like a big deal now, but in that day, it just seemed incredible.
May we never see th
I used gopher sometimes when I could not find information what I was looking for on the web
Still using the protocol to shut up people who are claiming that they are using 'the Internet for 20 years now' in chats etc.
When I ask them how they liked Gopher, they mostly always say they don't watch Sesamestreet anymore...
For me probably around 1996.
I also remember using archie and veronica extensively.
For the young pups, archie was a "text based" FTP search engine. Veronica was a "text based" gopher search engine.
--
Time is on my side
Never giving a brother a chance. Sure, she'll take his drugs, but give him a little taste on the down-low? Never.
Fucking white trash cunt.
When I moved into the dorms as an undergrad, I had a 16 Mhz 386 with a 2400 baud modem. Of all the technologies I was exposed to in the university, Gopher was cool because navigating it was somewhat manageable through my poor dial-up connection.
I finally upgraded that modem to a 28.8 in 1997. I got some mileage out of that 2400 baud, thanks in part to Gopher and lynx.
I speak from the perspective of a new student recieving their student pack with a CD in it with Gopher as one of the tools on it.
I can remember shifting from New Zealand in 1996 to enrol and University of Minneapolis for 3 years.
Students were set up with email accounts and a couple other services such as access to the library catalog.
I purchased a new computer (p166 32mb ram. Pretty hot stuff back then!) from Dinkytown Computers, just by the Uni. It already had the UMN tools loaded with gopher on the desktop! This screwdriver shop had some relationship with the UNM. I do not recall all the details, but one needed gopher to activate and setup their email and library account so it worked.
I cannot recall, but i think the library catalog was only available on gopher. Certainly you needed it for your lending record and reissues. Regardless thats what I used.
I guess the point is, it was encouraged technology by UMN at the time.
In post Patriot Act America, the library books scan you.
> One example from my campus is the retiring of the
> newsgroup server...
Idiots.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
The last specific time that I can recall using gopher was in about 1991 and I was searching for Simpsons scripts to settle a bet. Maybe it was 1990, not too sure.
I still like gopher... for storing, sharing, and finding specific documents (papers, notes, etc) it's really handy. My users, on the other hand, wouldn't know what to do with anything that didn't involve a web browser.
Karma only matters to me now and zen.
When I started at WPI in 1994 it was "gopher this, gopher that, gopher is so amazing blah blah" and then there was "Veronica" which was talked up even more so maybe it was written at WPI. It had something to do with gopher.
Anyway, the first time I had to research a subject I fired up Gopher, (not veronica, I think) and searched, and searched, and searched. And found utter garbage that had nothing to do with anything, (rantings and other nonsence) and I never used it again.
So, my answer to your question is either 94 or 95.
As for wanting to stick with older technologies, have you seen an osciloscope lately? Now they are basically a computer running win95 with an A/D card. Windows of course crashes and is in no way intuitive like the old scopes. It does allow you to save screen shots, but getting them out of the scope is a whole 'nother story. It has a floppy drive, if you can get your captures to fit on a floppy. It also has a NIC, but the drivers don't come installed. So, you have to hack around and do it yourself. But then you can't make it accessible to the network at work since you can't just log into the servers from an oscilloscope. What I eventually did was use Internet Explorer from the scope (gotta love monopoly integration) to download some software from the 'net and set up a share that could be seen by other computers at work.
The last time I used gopher was in 1996 for The Well.