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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?"
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.
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.
'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.
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Try Mozilla
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.
> 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.
Wow...I'm pretty sure that the Mac OS TurboGopher supported bookmarks.
I was really into getting a gopher server going a few years back. It took some work to even get one to compile on a current Red Hat system, and the setup is a pain in the ass compared to, say, Apache. There's been some resurgence of work on gopher recently, oddly enough, so it may be possible to use gopherd without trouble.
As someone else pointed out, gopher would be *phenomenal* for cell phones. It's lightweight, it doesn't push the capabilities, it uses text, arrow keys, and number keys...it's really pretty much perfect for cells. Unfortunately, there's enough Web-based infrastructure in place that I don't think that that's going to happen.
May we never see th
Are there any benifits of Gopher over http/html at all?
It's simpler, and has lighter client interface and system requirements. It's pretty fast. It's easier to implement a gopher client properly (one of the reasons I liked gopher back in the day was because lynx was so blinking unstable).
May we never see th