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?"

Comments

The last time I used Gopher

[xagon7]

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.

Are there any benifits of Gopher vs the Web?

[T-Ranger]

I remember using Gopher back in 1994 via Lynx on a text based dialup. Even viewing both via text, the web was infinitly better. While it may not be a requirement of the technology, all the gopher sites I went to were hierarchically based, with no cross linking. Some data hadent been webified, so gopher was still usefull, but it sucked.

Are there any benifits of Gopher over http/html at all?

Back when I was a Golden Gopher myself

[Saganaga]

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.

Re:Back when I was a Golden Gopher myself

[yelvington]

Actually, the hierarchy was NOT rigid. Any node on the tree could point to any Gopher address, so the navigational scheme could be a network and not merely a tree. However, text resources were by definition just text files, and were leaf nodes as a result. They couldn't point anywhere else.

The big breakthroughs of the Web were the ability to embed a hypertext link at any abitrary location in text, and the ability to embed images (introduced by Mosaic).

The Gopher model was excellent for a narrowband world. It was a tremendous breakthrough in a darkness where we all had to "just know" Telnet addresses like nyx.du.edu and FTP addresses like tsx-11.mit.edu. It worked great on a plain-text terminal. And it pioneered a lot of things that later made the Web usable, such as link-integrated search engines (Archie, which searched FTP archives, and Veronica, which searched Gopherspace).

If the cellphone companies weren't so self-destructively larcenous, they would have used Gopher instead of creating that awful WAP/WML mess.

Rutgers University in 1992-94

[Unholy_Kingfish]

My first and last experience was at Rutgers University. At the time Rutgers had lots on info running over Gopher for school stuff. But even then WWW was taking over as THE source for information. Every Comp Sci major (back then it meant programming only) was learning this new language called HTML. We spent more time doing stuff with that than actual work. Not to mention some hacking of the schools network.

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.

Gopher left a bad taste in my mouth....

[JGski]

The last time was about when gopher+ came out (not sure of the date). The changes to the license pushed me from being a gopher enthusiast into becoming a web enthusiast and gopher-hater. By accident of employment I was on the wrong side of the new UMinn license, despite working on an open-source derivative that was going to be open-source itself.

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.