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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?"
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.)
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...
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.
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/
erm, do you mean either Mosaic or Netscape , by any chance? Mozilla didn't become the name of a browser until some time around 1998, by which time I'm pretty sure there were plenty of HTTP servers around...
Telnet is an awful, awful protocl that shound never have been implemented, right from the start. Unless you're running an extremely resource-poor platform and need remote console access, there's no defendable reason to use it.
... where else would we get our daily giga-dose of free pr0n from?
*cough*
As for NNTP
Archie searched ftp sites for a given file. There was a central server that polled all the known sites occasionally, and it handled your requests.
Veronica indexed gopher sites, much like google does web sites.
Of course, you could have learned all this much faster by just using google.
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?)
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