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When was the Last Time You Used Gopher?

Posted by Cliff on from the go-for dept.

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?"

8 of 127 comments (clear)

  1. The last time I used Gopher by xagon7 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  2. Back when I was a Golden Gopher myself by Saganaga · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:Back when I was a Golden Gopher myself by yelvington · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.

  3. quux.org by Hajoma · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.)

  4. A useful resource by IMSoP · · Score: 5, Informative

    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...

  5. Re:how odd by Brynath · · Score: 4, Insightful
    Ummm,

    SSH?

  6. I remember clearly when I last used gopher by nomadic · · Score: 4, Funny

    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?

  7. Gopher left a bad taste in my mouth.... by JGski · · Score: 4, Interesting
    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.