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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?"

2 of 127 comments (clear)

  1. 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.)

  2. 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...