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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.
Are there any benifits of Gopher over http/html at all?
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.
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.)
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
'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 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/
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 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.
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.
(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!
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?
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.
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!