All of Gopherspace Available For Download

An anonymous reader writes "Cory Doctorow tells us that '[i]n 2007, John Goerzen scraped every gopher site he could find (gopher was a menu-driven text-only precursor to the Web; I got my first online gig programming gopher sites). He saved 780,000 documents, totalling 40GB. Today, most of this is offline, so he's making the entire archive available as a .torrent file; the compressed data is only 15GB. Wanna host the entire history of a medium? Here's your chance!' Get yourself a piece of pre-Internet history (torrent)." Update: 04/30 00:16 GMT by T: As several readers have pointed out below, our anonymous friend probably meant to say "pre-Web," rather than "pre-Internet."

Comments

Shame on Slashdot

[suso]

Here's your chance!' Get yourself a piece of pre-Internet history

I think Jon Postel is rolling in his grave right now.

Re:Shame on Slashdot

[commodore64_love]

Beat me to it. The summary should read "Get yourself a piece of pre-world wide web history," since gopher came AFTER the birth of the internet (1981) but before the widespread usage of the web (circa 1993).

Re:Shame on Slashdot

[Daniel Dvorkin]

Seriously. The story submitter was anonymous (probably a good thing!) but I'm really shocked that any Slashdot editor could let that line go through without comment. And spare me the "you must be new here" line -- I know perfectly well that /. editing standards can get pretty sloppy, but this is particularly egregious. Calling Gopher "pre-internet" is the kind of crap I'd expect on a mainstream news site, not from "News for Nerds."

Re:Shame on Slashdot

[suso]

since gopher came AFTER the birth of the internet (1981) but before the widespread usage of the web (circa 1993).

I hope you don't mean the birth of the Internet was in 1981. Or maybe you typoed 1991 (when Wikipedia says gopher was released)? I thought gopher was actually a bit older than that.

I just wish people would stop holding onto FTP like they were Charlton Heston.

Re:Shame on Slashdot

[commodore64_love]

Ooops. I should have said the internet was born in 1983. "The first TCP/IP-based wide-area network was operational by January 1, 1983 when all hosts on the ARPANET were switched over from the older NCP protocols." - wikipedia

   

Re:Shame on Slashdot

[mobby_6kl]

Really? You are shocked that a slashdot editor doesn't check and correct the stories he posts? You must be new here.

Re:Shame on Slashdot

[Daniel Dvorkin]

Really? You are shocked that a slashdot editor doesn't check and correct the stories he posts? You must be new here.

I don't normally get into this kind of dick-waving contest, but ... you might want to check our UIDs.

My point is that even by Slashdot standards, this is unusually bad.

Re:Shame on Slashdot

[religious freak]

Someone. Please, please, PLEASE enlighten me on the difference between web and Internet. Yeah, I know they're different and it's a matter of protocols, but I've heard this for years and honestly still don't quite get it.

Re:Shame on Slashdot

[atomicthumbs]

The Internet is a gigantic computer network. E-mail, Gopher, newsgroups, DNS, remote desktop, multiplayer games, and the Web are some applications that use the Internet. The world wide web is all the websites accessible by using an Internet browser. Some of those (Gmail, etc.) provide web-based interfaces to other Internet services.

Re:Shame on Slashdot

[Anonymous Coward]

"You must be new here" doesn't always literally mean, "I believe you are a new user". You must have realized this. No one cares about UIDs except butthurt oldfags.

Re:Shame on Slashdot

[Anonymous Coward]

Folks, we've hit a new didn't-RTFA low. This is the "didn't finish reading the parent's 4-sentence post before responding" baseline.

Re:Shame on Slashdot

[yotto]

Really? You think that someone asking if you're new here means they think you're new here?

Are you new here?

Re:Shame on Slashdot

[whoop]

I've been around a while, and I can't think of any time a Slashdot editor fact-checked, spell-checked, or proofread a submission. Look at it, they put the entire thing into a quote. That way they can just say they're quoting the submitter and that's what he said.

They might add the "UserXXX writes," part themselves, but a couple characters of perl could probably do that part just as well.

Re:Shame on Slashdot

[Grant_Watson]

This definition is probably looser than most, but here's a quick and dirty view:

The Web is a huge collection of interlinked documents addressable by URLs and served with HTTP. The Internet is the world-wide TCP/IP network over which the Web and many other services operate.

Re:Shame on Slashdot

[Grapes4Buddha]

I have an EE degree. What's a good 2nd degree? CMP ENG or Comp Sci? I want to be eligible to apply for more jobs.

You already have a technical degree. Get a business, marketing, sales, or management degree. If you're fresh out of school, you'll be happy in 5-10 years that you did. If you have experience, it will open doors for you now.

Re:Shame on Slashdot

[HTH NE1]

Maybe he just got his words in the wrong order: a piece of Internet prehistory.

Re:Shame on Slashdot

[pizza_milkshake]

Here's my explanation in graphic form: http://parseerror.com/images/explain/internet-vs-web.jpg

Re:Shame on Slashdot

[suso]

Um, the generally accepted start of the Internet is by activities surrounding the start of ARPANET in the late 1960s. ARPA in its name still lives on as part of reverse DNS entries. Some people say it started in 1967, some say 1969, either way, it was much earlier than 1981 and there are a lot more protocols that are part of what we call "the Internet" than just TCP/IP, although of course not all of it is routed globally. Check your /etc/protocols file sometime, the first line says Internet (IP) protocols.

Re:Shame on Slashdot

[Gorobei]

I have an EE degree. What's a good 2nd degree? CMP ENG or Comp Sci? I want to be eligible to apply for more jobs.

You are eligible to apply for all jobs now. The trick is actually getting one.

Second degrees are a net loss in the market. One degree means you are of at least average intelligence and can show up on time when it counts. Two degrees means pretty much the same thing.

Re:Shame on Slashdot

[nacturation]

History of the Internet from 1957 to present:

http://vimeo.com/2696386?pg=embed&sec=2696386

Quite educational, even if you think you know all about it.

Re:Shame on Slashdot

[narcc]

The world wide web is all the websites accessible by using an Internet browser.

Fail

Re:Shame on Slashdot

[nacturation]

Having just watched it again, it may not fully answer your question. With what you learned from the video in mind, the OSI model is the layers the video talked about. There are seven layers altogether, with the lowermost layer being the physical hardware everything runs on, followed by the network connecting the hardware, then how data is passed over the network, and so on until you get to the application layer. You've heard of TCP/IP? That's TCP (layer 4) running on top of an IP (layer 3) network. ICMP is a different network which is what things like 'ping' (ICMP echo) and 'traceroute' run over. You've heard of UDP? That's another layer 4 protocol different from TCP.

What runs on the application layer is things you're already familiar with. SMTP (email), telnet, FTP, DNS, NTP (network time protocol), and so on including HTTP. HTTP is effectively the web -- it's what a world wide web browser ("web browser", or now just "browser" for short) uses as its primary protocol and why you see URLs starting with http: . So HTTP or "the web" is an application that runs on top of everything below it. You still need the physical hardware, the network connecting the hardware, the various transmission protocols and so on to deliver the data used by the web. Similarly, SMTP or commonly just "email" is an application that runs on top of everything below it.

Think of the acronyms if that will help you understand it better. SMTP is Simple Mail Transfer Protocol, a protocol for transferring simple mail. HTTP is HyperText Transfer Protocol, a protocol for transferring hypertext. FTP is File Transfer Protocol, a protocol for transferring files. NNTP is Network News Transfer Protocol, a protocol for transferring network news, what you've likely heard of as simply Usenet or "newsgroups". You get the idea.

That's the simplistic view of things. In reality, HTTP has been extended to transfer more than just hypertext. Through the use of MIME types (image/gif, image/jpeg, text/html, text/xml, image/binary, and so on) you can transfer arbitrary things that browsers and other applications can understand.

Hopefully that makes a bit more sense.

Re:Shame on Slashdot

[simoncpu was here]

*woooooooooooosh*

Re:Shame on Slashdot

[tuomoks]

Lost cause trying to get even IT people to know about networks and how / why they came - nobody (well, most) knows or even want's to know the history today. It's so funny when the youngsters, maybe had their first experience in 80's or maybe even coded "assembler" in 70's (not really but that's another story), talk about network, protocols, multi tasking / threading / programming / etc, whatever. The knowledge and education is (very!) bad today, has gone down (IMHO) since 70's. Ask about SDLC today - you think that they would know about the protocol, no, it's a marketing term today "Systems Development Life Cycle" - ok, whatever does that mean except the same old thing? A funny thing - HDLC (you know that?) was based on SDLC (well, we can talk about that in some other time) - look the current low level protocols, error correction, addressing, routing, whatever - what do you find?

So - networks, even start / stop, pure ASCII (or EBCDIC), global X.25, global SNA, whatever networks have been there a long, long time!

Re:Shame on Slashdot

[tuomoks]

Haven't read all the replies but Internet isn't just TCP/IP !!!! The many exclamation marks because that's a common error - Internet isn't even an pure IP network, much what happens in there is on Ethernet level or even using other lower level protocols, still! Yes - I know, it's defined in Wiki as a TCP/IP network but, after designing / developing / delivering a lot of systems using "Internet" and sometimes UDP, sometimes other IP based protocols, sometimes working just on Ethernet level / link layer / even on signal level - all of them working today to support huge communities, I have a little different view, sorry! The Wiki entry is kind of funny but maybe not meant to be technical?

WEB - "The Web, is a system of interlinked hypertext documents contained on the Internet" - here the Wiki is more correct, not really but getting there, you just can't really write a real definition in such small space. As we today speak about WEB is an abstract, nothing physical, connecting and allowing an access to information, text, pictures, video, whatever but doesn't say how - oh, maybe HTML but that's just presentation! Only the companies / corporations trying to sell something (making money as we all?) try to connect (buzz?) words to technology.

Re:Shame on Slashdot

[brusk]

Your picture should also show the internet truck that carries all the information on it.

Re:Shame on Slashdot

[zmollusc]

Where do the tubes come in? Are they buried under the superhighway?

Re:Shame on Slashdot

[L4t3r4lu5]

Damn right! If only the slogan read "News by nerds"

Re:Shame on Slashdot

[Anonymous Coward]

It's so funny when the youngsters, maybe had their first experience in 80's or maybe even coded "assembler" in 70's (not really but that's another story), talk about network, protocols, multi tasking / threading / programming / etc, whatever. The knowledge and education is (very!) bad today, has gone down (IMHO) since 70's.

If you only had real experience in the 70s, you're just another young know-nothing who thinks they know everything since they've had "experience". Come back to me when you about Mechanical Routed Steam Catridge Distributers and how mercury switched pneumatic constriction valves worked. We were doing packet switching before the word was invented, 80 years ago!

Right, let's learn about every obsolescent technology and pay patronage to IBM. Get a hold of yourself.

Re:Shame on Slashdot

[jeremyp]

Actually, the Internet is the world-wide IP network. TCP is just one of many protocols that are used to transmit information across it.

Re:Shame on Slashdot

[Anonymous Coward]

BBN - 1969.

Re:Shame on Slashdot

[Compaqt]

Would you like to share a better definition?

Re:Shame on Slashdot

[Anonymous Coward]

Thank you. Now I can say I love the internet but hate the web.

Re:Shame on Slashdot

[commodore64_love]

Actually I'd say it's half-and-half.

Half trace the internet to ARPAnet, while the other half say ARPAnet and the IP-based Internet are not the same thing because they use different protocols. Just like a Mac and PC are not the same thing. Sure they share the same foundation (Intel CPU) but otherwise, not the same.

Re:Shame on Slashdot

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't get it either - care to explain?

Re:Shame on Slashdot

[adamdoyle]

I believe the "fail" was directed at the GP's reference to an "internet browser" rather than a "web browser." (which is pretty bad considering GP was attempting to explain the difference between the two)

Re:Shame on Slashdot

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been around a while, and I can't think of any time a Slashdot editor fact-checked, spell-checked, or proofread a submission. Look at it, they put the entire thing into a quote. That way they can just say they're quoting the submitter and that's what he said.

They might add the "UserXXX writes," part themselves, but a couple characters of perl could probably do that part just as well.

I am the original story submitter, and for obvious reasons I would like to continue to remain anonymous! (Yes, I know the difference between the Web and the Internet...I apologize profusely for my faux pas!)

I can assure you the /. editors do edit. Here is my original submission:

An anonymous reader writes "Cory Doctorow tells us that in 2007, John Goerzen scraped every gopher site he could find (gopher was a menu-driven text-only precursor to the Web; I got my first online gig programming gopher sites). He saved 780,000 documents, totalling 40GB. Today, most of this is offline, so he's making the entire archive available as a .torrent file; the compressed data is only 15GB. Wanna host the entire history of a medium? Here's your chance!

Go get yourself a piece of pre-Internet history here!"

The original links were "Cory Doctorow" (moved to the "780,000 documents" line), as well as an editorial change to "in" (modified to "[i]n"). Which is clear evidence that (1) one or more /. editors reviewed the linked article and made editorial changes, and (2) said editor(s) missed my mistake.

Again, my sincerest apologies for the error. Where do I turn in my geek card?

Re:Shame on Slashdot

[elrous0]

Okay, time for your nap, Mr. Peters.

Re:Shame on Slashdot

[lewiscr]

To reply to your signature:

I have an EE degree. What's a good 2nd degree? CMP ENG or Comp Sci? I want to be eligible to apply for more jobs.

You're already an engineer, so you can be an engineer with any degree. The CMP Eng degree will have more overlap with your EE degree than CS will, but I neither should be difficult.

If you looking to SEO your resume, I'd go with Comp Sci, for the slightly higher name recognition. For anybody that actually reads your resume, you can explain how CMP EE is the overlap of EE and CS, so you effectively have 3 degrees. Interviewers love Venn diagrams. ;-)

If someone has a single degree, I'd prefer the CmpE over CS. But I'd accept your Venn diagram.

Re:Shame on Slashdot

[Anonymous Coward]

... and a snapshot taken in 2007 is hardly 1993's gopher population.

I'm nostalgic, so I'm going to snoop later. But I suspect everything I might have had a hand in -- and a big chunk of stuff I used regularly -- will be gone as universities turned off gopher daemons. /tl;dr: 14 years is a couple gopher-server lifetimes.

Far cry from "all of gopherspace"

[damn_registrars]

This was just all that was available in 2007. Had he done the same in 1997 it would have been quite a bit different - I'd suspect it would have been quite a bit larger then as well.

Re:Far cry from "all of gopherspace"

[Anonymous Coward]

pffft. If he really cared about internet history he would have gone after everything on archie. That is where all the really cool kids hung out.

Re:Far cry from "all of gopherspace"

[vikingpower]

Do you have any facts or figures underpinning your statements ?

Re:Far cry from "all of gopherspace"

[Anonymous Coward]

Does TFA?

Re:Far cry from "all of gopherspace"

[migla]

"Do you have any facts or figures underpinning your statements ?"

That would indeed be interesting, but GP makes a reasonable assumption, akin to "There were more horse carriages out and about before the automobile." No?

Re:Far cry from "all of gopherspace"

[rtaylor]

On a regular basis? Yes. Than exist in barns today for special occasions or limited use, possibly not.

It has been indicated that more people know how to properly shoe a horse today than in the late 1800's. Lower percentage of the population, and not something they do every-day, but a larger total number of people.

I wouldn't be surprised if the total number of documents on Gopher continued to climb despite the percentage of content on Gopher decreasing rapidly. The cost to host has rapidly decreased and amount of content in general has increased significantly that the total number of items could still be higher today than in the 90's.

Re:Far cry from "all of gopherspace"

[migla]

Good point. A similarly unintuitive fact is that there are more slaves today than ever before in history.

Re:Far cry from "all of gopherspace"

[geekoid]

Maybe not.
I think the growth of HD space since 1997 might ahve you thinking that 40GB isn't much. . . today it wouldn't be, in 1997? That was huge.

I don't have any figures, and wuld welcome actual numbers, but is does seem like a 'raising the bar' issue.

Re:Far cry from "all of gopherspace"

[tomhudson]

But there's probably a lot that's missing. I find it hard to believe the average pre-bloated-web-page "document" is over 50k. That's a LOT of plain-text.

Re:Far cry from "all of gopherspace"

[Obfuscant]

Do you have any facts or figures underpinning your statements ?

Yes.

In 1997 we had a 100Gb disk array holding the research data from our lab, all of which was available via gopher (and ftp, and the web). We moved to a 200Gb array shortly after, and then a 400Gb after that. And then 3Tb, around 2008.

Sometime around 2007 or 2008 the SunOS system that ran the gopher server died permanently and was replaced by a virtual linux server without gopher. Even without that server, I found not long ago that I was still creating .cap files -- which were gopher, as I recall, but maybe archie.

Quantitatively, online currently I have more than 15Gb of data for just 1997, all of which was gophered at the time. In 1998, another 18Gb.

So, I would say, had the gopher scraping been done in 1997 instead of 2007, the result would have been a lot more data. In fact, a few months earlier in 2007 and it might have BEEN a lot bigger.

Re:Far cry from "all of gopherspace"

[afidel]

Gopher was already waning pretty heavily by 97, its heyday was probably 93-95 because by late 1995 you had Windows 95 and Navigator making the GUI web very approachable.

Re:Far cry from "all of gopherspace"

[Anonymous Coward]

Very doubtful it would have been much larger, especially with the cost of storage in '97 vs '07. Likewise, we all adopted a different mindset re: data and file sizes. I remember getting by with a 50k download limit per day on some BBSes back in the late 80s.

Re:Far cry from "all of gopherspace"

[Hurricane78]

Why would you state your disk sizes in gigabit?

Re:Far cry from "all of gopherspace"

[Seraphim1982]

I think the growth of HD space since 1997 might have you thinking that they are the only way to store large amounts of data. You could have stored 40GB with a handful of tapes in 1997.

Re:Far cry from "all of gopherspace"

[omglolbah]

Because as most users of the internet he wasnt accurate about the unit.

From the context one can assume (without that big a risk of error) that he is indeed speaking about gigabyte, and not gigabit.

Buuut, anal responses are more important than content. We know this :-p

Re:Far cry from "all of gopherspace"

[badboy_tw2002]

Stop making fun of him, he's not Turing tested yet. In a few years, he'll start noticing some changes and then he'll grow up to be a big boy AI that can interact with the rest of us.

Re:Far cry from "all of gopherspace"

[omglolbah]

Ah, that explains it ;)

Re:Far cry from "all of gopherspace"

[TangoMargarine]

more people know how to properly shoe a horse today

(emphasis added)

Re:Far cry from "all of gopherspace"

[TangoMargarine]

LOL, pwned.

Re:Far cry from "all of gopherspace"

[Trepidity]

You mean gibibyte, right?

*struggles to avoid giggling at the term*

Re:Far cry from "all of gopherspace"

[awehttam]

Because as most users of the internet he wasnt accurate about the unit.

Is that an African or European Internet?

Re:Far cry from "all of gopherspace"

[Hurricane78]

What troll marked this troll? 4chan got mod points again?

Re:Far cry from "all of gopherspace"

[Hurricane78]

Ok, then let’s all count our data rate in “Internets” or ”LoC per adpd (average donkey pooping duration)”, and let the point float freely between 0.00000000001 and 100000000.0.

Because according to you, units are clearly pointless, as it’s all in the context, correct?

Wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

Pre-web? Yes
Pre-Internet? No

Re:Wrong

[Bootsy Collins]

Yeah, the article poster is a bit confused.

Re:Wrong

[gyrogeerloose]

To a lot of people, WWW=Internet. Us old greybeards who remember when the Internet was telnet, FTP, e-mail and Usenet know better.

Re:Wrong

[commodore64_love]

Wasn't the pre-WWW Usenet technically a separate network (like Fidonet) from the internet?

Re:Wrong

[uglyduckling]

IIRC Usenet wasn't a network so much as local repositories which synced. Your local Usenet server would sync up with other peer servers on a schedule, I suppose a bit like a massive distributed email system. Some Usenet sites weren't strictly Internet connected, but many used the Internet as the means to communicate with peer servers.

Re:Wrong

[gandhi_2]

I remember when fingering the gopher was totally normal.

Re:Wrong

[elfprince13]

UUCP was the original method used for Usenet transfer, and was distinct from the Internet, but it was hooked up to the Internet at various locations to make contact with servers outside the local UUCP network. This was an era when email (transferred via UUCP) could take longer than snail mail to make it to its intended user (and the addresses were more like a full trip-map than just an address)

Re:Wrong

[gyrogeerloose]

Wasn't the pre-WWW Usenet technically a separate network (like Fidonet) from the internet?

Yep, you're right. My old greybeard memory forgot that, although I always accessed my Usenet groups via the Internet anyway.

Re:Wrong

[Rene S. Hollan]

Usenet carried posts and articles in newsgroups. Synchronization took place via abstracted mechanisms, most commonly uucp over serial modem links.

So, yes, Usenet preceded the Internet in the sense that it did not rely in IP, though both generally evolved around the same time.

But, there was a rather vibrant pre-WWW internet where the protocols of choice were smtp (mail), ftp (file transfer), and gopher and archie for repositories of places to find stuff. News could be carried via nntp (net news transfer protocol).

What some may not know was that sendmail could work over transiently connected points as well, rather like usenet. Anyone still remember bang path notation? One would address mail using the sequence of hosts required to get it from one's own to the destination, using names understood by each successive host in the sequence. One of the reasons sendmail configuration files were so horrendous was to permit relaying between networks using different host naming conventions.

Re:Wrong

[commodore64_love]

Ahhh the good old days.

You post a question on rec.arts.tv like, "When does the new season of TNG start?", wait for the midnight syncing between your local BBS and the rest of the nation, and then you come back tomorrow morning to learn the answer. If you're lucky. Sometimes you had to wait 2 days for a reply.

Re:Wrong

[commodore64_love]

>>>I always accessed my Usenet groups via the Internet anyway

I used a 1 kbit/s modem (yes very slow). My messages are still archived on google groups, and I wish there was a way to erase them, because it's somewhat embarrassing to read posts from your teenage self 25 years ago (especially the typos). ;-)

Re:Wrong

[afidel]

Archie only predated the web by about 24 months and sucked by comparison, there's a reason it died off quickly.

Re:Wrong

[gyrogeerloose]

My messages are still archived on google groups, and I wish there was a way to erase them, because it's somewhat embarrassing to read posts from your teenage self 25 years ago (especially the typos). ;-)

"The Internet Never Forgets." Unfortunately.

There are a few things of mine in the archives I wish would go away too. At least they're mostly under nicks that aren't easily traced to me anymore.

Re:Wrong

[Rene S. Hollan]

Yeah, I remember having a fast 9600bps link to another node at the place I worked.

Then, in the Web's infancy, 2400bps data connections were almost bearable for browsing. I dunno if the Web "grew up" as much as it "grew fat".

Re:Wrong

[Paracelcus]

Don't forget UUCP, via 300 baud modem, it could couple multiple nodes similar to Fido.

Re:Wrong

[Bearhouse]

And to us real old greybeards, going online used to be BBS...remember BIX?
(For you lawn-squatting youngsters: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte_Information_Exchange)

Re:Wrong

[Alioth]

A funny thing happened to me a while back.

I was trying to build Nethack for a server, and it was failing linking on some missing curses library. So I did a google search to try to find out which library I was missing so I could find which -dev package I needed to install to get this library.

The first Google search result was... ...a post by *me* asking *exactly* the same question ("Which lib do I need") almost 15 years earlier on one of the linux newsgroups!

Re:Wrong

[bregmata]

Feh, gerroff my lawn. I remember having a fast 1200 bps connection. It was just soo much better than the 300 bps connection for anything, although I could use the same acoustic coupler for either the fast or slow networking.

Re:Wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

Mr. goatse, is that you?

Re:Wrong

[david_thornley]

Actually, I found that the most reliable way to get the answer was to post something wrong in a conditional format: "The new season of TNG starts August 3, doesn't it?" Possibly dropping the conditional format would have worked even better, but I didn't want to deliberately post false statements.

Re:Wrong

[david_thornley]

The neat thing about the acoustic coupler was that I could whistle the right note and it would take it as an attempt to connect. I enjoyed playing with the thing's little mind, fooling it into thinking it was getting into a meaningful relationship with something.

That's what I missed when I skipped 1200 entirely and went straight to 2400. Man, that was speed, at least in those days.

Re:Wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

Unless you were at a university. And had a key to an all-night terminal room.
Ah, so much time wonderfully wasted.

Re:Wrong

[gyrogeerloose]

And to us real old greybeards, going online used to be BBS...remember BIX?

I never used BIX but I used the local dial-up BBSs and FidoNet a lot. Also AOL when it was still called AppleLink.

Re:Wrong

[archivis]

So did you get your answer in old newsgroup thread?

Re:Wrong

[ClioCJS]

i spent years looking for a multiplayer nethack... boy did i feel dumb... i wrote a blog about it, but it wont post for a few weeks [future dated]: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com/2010/05/20/journal-computer-old-school-computing-tribute-to-nethack-i-used-to-look-for-the-net-in-nethack-but-never-found-it/

Your BBCode...

[FF8Jake]

you forgot to close it.

Interesting

[vikingpower]

I remember my first steps on the Web, and being fascinated by Gopher. I am certainly going to download this stuff, there's history here, for anyone to be kept.

Re:Interesting

[commodore64_love]

I thought Gopher was okay, but not near as exciting as my first exposure to Amiga Mosaic web browser. After all, it had teh 4000-color pron. ;-) Plus exciting sites like this one: http://web.archive.org/web/19961114151757/http://scifi.com/ - I mean how cool is that? It's animated and colorful. :-)

Aside -

Looking at that schedule reminds me how cool Sci-Fi Channel used to be. Weekend Anime. Inside Space reports. Sci-Fi Trader. Sci-Fi Buzz. FTL Newsfeed. It was like a geek paradise for fandom. Today's channel is more akin to watching the TNT channel - ordinary and nothing special.

Re:Interesting

[cyclomedia]

Ever since the RSS vs ATOM war peaked (and fizzled) i've been waiting for a re-gopherisation of the internet, where files, videos, music, audio and pictures are all linked and indexxed by interconnected RSS feeds that dont include all the crud you have to wade through in web pages to get anywhere. Something akin to MRSS with png thumbnails and optional links to "buy the dvd box set now" where you could create your own Channels (feeds full of links to shows directly, or other feeds) and then browsable from your telly directly, i think i'm rambling

Re:Interesting

[street_astrologist]

Basically Windows Media Center + Netflix + Hulu gives this functionality (with interstitial advertisement of course).

Re:Interesting

[cyclomedia]

Yeah it probably does, but i was rambling about an open standard so that the video/image/audio formats are standard and the XML Channel/Feed format is standard so every mobile phone, desktop, telly and pocket watch with an internet connection could parse it very easily

Re:Interesting

[soupforare]

At least now there's RASSLIN'

Oh gopher from su.se

[Anonymous Coward]

Porn, lots of porn. Also, not understanding why emacs wouldn't run on a mac.

The Ultimate Lesson in Open Source and Standards

[eldavojohn]

In a bizarre case of ineptitude, my alma mater (due to financial problems or something) announced they would charge licensing fees for the use of its implementation of the Gopher server in February of 1993. This caused people to worry that eventually the standard and protocol itself would also be licensed. It did have other technical flaws but I think a lot of people thought Gopher could have become the internet had Beners-Lee not released a free for public use implementation of the hypertext concept.

That move by the U of MN is a great lesson in how licensing can kill innovation. Standards should always be open and guaranteed open.

Pre-internet history?

[nebaz]

The web is NOT the internet. (Though sadly it essentially has become so, nowadays.)

Re:Pre-internet history?

[quixote9]

yes, yes, yes. Pre-www history. Not pre-internet. (Honestly. What do they teach them in these schools?)

Re:Pre-internet history?

[dingen]

Why is that sad?

Re:Pre-internet history?

[brainboyz]

Because the internet is not restricted to what you can do on a handful of ports with little more than a handful of protocols. That so many technical professionals limit themselves to the "web" tends to restrict creativity.

Re:Pre-internet history?

[Anonymous Coward]

The web is NOT the internet. (Though sadly it essentially has become so, nowadays.)

Hardly. Most traffic is bittorrent and email (mostly spam).

Re:Pre-internet history?

[calmofthestorm]

They teach us the difference and why it no longer matters;P

Re:Pre-internet history?

[calmofthestorm]

I suppose that's fair enough. Still, when I think about culture and the like, the web is all that really comes to mind. Even things that may happen in other protocols still end up on the web if they are more fleeting than a moment or public than a few people.

If someone told me to archive the entire internet, I'd consider the www both necessary and sufficient.

Re:Pre-internet history?

[Anonymous Coward]

They teach us the difference and why it no longer matters;P

Tell that to people using non-WWW email clients, pushing SOAP data, sshing into their servers, using Skype, video chat, P2P software, etc.

While the WWW is becoming ubiquitous, with Google and Bing as major hubs, there's a lot of stuff (including everything going via UDP) happening on the Internet that has little or nothing to do with WWW (or even http[s] for the most part).

Re:Pre-internet history?

[ls671]

There has been a "webalization" process that took place, even encapsulating database connection in HTTP (special type of database driver) and all sorts of other protocols. Further more, a tendency to use port 80 has also prevailed even when not using HTTP. Last time I checked, Skype uses port 80 by default to listen on the local machine.

One of the logical explanation I see which might have caused this: It all started to occur when corporations started to tighten their security, installing firewalls and starting to block ports and access to subnets which did not even use the reserved IP (10.X.X.X, 172.16.X.X-172.31.X.X ,192.168.X.X) space back then but real non reserved for LAN internet IP ;-)

Re:Pre-internet history?

[Twinbee]

Maybe, but isn't the 'web' basically like a turing machine that can emulate everything else if need be?

Re:Pre-internet history?

[Anonymous Coward]

The web is NOT the internet. (Though sadly it essentially has become so, nowadays.)

You say this in reply to an article which links directly to a BitTorrent file?

Re:Pre-internet history?

[Moridineas]

Interesting claims, given that things like World of Warcraft, instant messenger, voip, doom, and even BitTorrent don't run over "the web" by these semantics. BitTorrent is facilitated by torrent files most frequently downloaded over the web... A lot of people clock a lot of time on the internet in ways that is not "the web."

Really is shocking to me to see so many people even on a site like slashdot clearly not understand the difference, or try to minimize it. Then again, I guess colloquially the web is tcp/ip, ssh, ftp, bittorent, dns, http and html (etc) all together so perhaps it's not so surprising.

Re:Pre-internet history?

[daveime]

To put some perspective on it for non-nerds / Slashdot editors.

Port 80 and 443 are the Web ... the other 65534 ports are the Internet, where everything interesting happens.

Re:Pre-internet history?

[SavvyPlayer]

All of which (except SSH) typically run on port 80 -- we routinely teach our firewalls the difference, and that it no longer matters...

Re:Pre-internet history?

[the_womble]

POP and IMAP typically run on port 80? Bit torrent? IM clients?

Re:Pre-internet history?

[Anonymous Coward]

What's the internet?

Re:Pre-internet history?

[SavvyPlayer]

SMTP message bodies are quite often HTML. POP and IMAP may suffer the same fate as NNTP in another 10-20 years if the signal-to-noise ratio continues to diminish (goes from 99% to 99.999% spam). BitTorrent uses HTTP for tracker communications, but will never be considered mainstream while it is primarily used for copyright infringement, and IM clients may not be running on port 80 yet but they are increasingly using HTTP (if not HTML formatting as well), specifically to minimize the barrier to adoption posed by firewalls. So these examples support the spirit of my previous observation quite well, thanks.

Re:Pre-internet history?

[Beezlebub33]

The web is NOT the internet. (Though sadly it essentially has become so, nowadays.)

Hardly. Most traffic is bittorrent and email (mostly spam).

Apparently that was true two years ago, but not any more.

The number one user of traffic is video streaming (porn, youtube (and similar ilk), netflix, etc.) and music streaming.

Re:Pre-internet history?

[Anonymous Coward]

The body of an SMTP message has abso-freaking-lutely nothing to do with being sent via HTTP. I can write HTML on a postcard and ship it to a fellow geek - was that HTTP?

No, it wasn't.

You're starting to sound exceptionally silly.

Re:Pre-internet history?

[Anonymous Coward]

The web is NOT the internet. (Though sadly it essentially has become so, nowadays.)

Hardly. Most traffic is bittorrent and email (mostly spam).

Judging by the statements of most internet users, "The Internet" is the home page which displays when you open the "Internet" in Windows.

Gopher isn't dead.

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.tekeeze.com/geeky/7-fun-sites-you-can-only-find-on-the-gopher-internet/

Includes things like Twitpher (which might not be working right now) Twitter for Gopher.

Firefox (others?) supports gopher://

Re:Gopher isn't dead.

[mattack2]

Sigh...

This website lets you play with "fortune," an old Linux app

Fortune goes back much farther than Linux.
It's not on my Mac OS X machine, Wikipedia's page says:

A fortune program first appeared in Version 7 Unix. The most common version on modern systems is the BSD fortune, originally written by Ken Arnold.

Re:Gopher isn't dead.

[Anonymous Coward]

SeaMonkey also has decent Gopher support. Firefox, with the Overbite extension, becomes a really great Gopher client. For more information I'd suggest the relevant category of the Open Directory Project.

Gopher

[MrEricSir]

So does this mean we're getting 6 more weeks of winter or not?

Re:Gopher

[value_added]

LOL. That would be a groundhog.

Re:Gopher

[forkazoo]

So does this mean we're getting 6 more weeks of winter or not?

No, just another ten years of November.

Re:Gopher

[gandhi_2]

OH MY GOD!

Where the fuck are my mod points!!!!

Re:Gopher

[Anonymous Coward]

So does this mean we're getting 6 more weeks of winter or not?

No, just another ten years of November.

I believe you mean September.

Re:Gopher

[geekoid]

You sir, are awesome.

Re:Gopher

[afidel]

Isn't it ten more years of September, aka the September that never ended?

Re:Gopher

[forkazoo]

I believe you mean September.

D'oh. Well, it was almost a good joke.

Maybe I should get outside more. Like most slashdotters, I can't actual tell the difference between the months!

Re:Gopher

[Anonymous Coward]

I wondered why we got snow this late into April ...

Re:Gopher

[russotto]

Isn't it ten more years of September, aka the September that never ended?

Except September did end. Newbies on Usenet aren't a problem anymore. The problem now is it's late December for Usenet and there ain't no next year.

What a terrible Marketting line

[Monkeedude1212]

I can look around the room and find hundreds of pieces of pre-internet history.

Is there any other point you can try and sell me on?

Re:What a terrible Marketting line

[McGiraf]

new furniture?

Not pre-internet history

[DarkOx]

Pre WWW history sure but GOPHER was a protocol for use on the internet.

Re:The Ultimate Lesson in Open Source and Standard

[wsanders]

If Gopher might had became the Internets: Imagine all those VT-terminals that wouldn't be in landfills!

And we'd be working on Gopher-5, the Flash-killer!

Copyright

[Anonymous Coward]

Each page of gopher published content will be covered by copyright. Has John Goerzen obtained permission to republish and distribute this content? Does any such permission extend to those who join a torrent swarm for this?

Re:Copyright

[Anonymous Coward]

Does anyone give a frak?

Re:Copyright

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes and you ankle biters need to back the hell up while us old folks are reminiscing.

Is Gopherspace

[Anonymous Coward]

a botnet or a pre-botnet?

Losers.

Thanks for playing.

Yours In History,
K. Trout

Re:The Ultimate Lesson in Open Source and Standard

[Anonymous Coward]

The main things that killed Gopher were 1) no hypertext and 2) practically no support for graphics or any media other than text. Gopher started to thrive in the pre-Windows 3.1 days, when the vast majority of computers had text interfaces. Once GUIs started to spread, and the hypertext-based HTTP came out, Gopher was pretty much dead. Open licensing wouldn't have made a difference.

1996 bookmarks with gophers

[s-whs]

Yes, rat infested they were. I counted a massive number of 4 gophers in my booksmarks from 1996.

"gopher://cwis.usc.edu/11/Other_Gophers_and_Information_Resources/Gophers_by_Subject/Gopher_Jewels/Istuff/fun/fun" (a list of cool resources...)

"gopher://gopher.lysator.liu.se:70/11/lysator-Science_Fiction_Archive" (I think this is where I got the Blake's 7 scrips from)

"gopher://www.library.ucsb.edu:70/11/journals/usenet" (not sure what this was about)

"gopher://wiretap.spies.com:70/11/Library/Fringe/Ufo"

I wonder if they're in the archive...

Re:The Ultimate Lesson in Open Source and Standard

[Hatta]

That's more the fault of the clients than the protocol. There's no reason you can't serve hypertext documents over gopher, and no reason a gopher client couldn't display graphics.

Re:The Ultimate Lesson in Open Source and Standard

[Anonymous Coward]

What, exactly, would be the markup for hypertext in gopher? I don't think there was one.

I miss Gopher

[Adrian Lopez]

As much as I love the more advanced technology of the modern Internet, there's a soft spot in my heart for Gopher and the Internet circa 1993. Gopher is the way I found the first MUDs I ever played, how I found and was granted access (via telnet) to a Free-net (freenet.calgary.ab.ca) which gave me my own email address and access to newsgroups. Then came the Web, and Yahoo still looked a bit like a Gopher site, and I continued to use Gopher through my provider's PPP connection until it became a niche thing.

Re:I miss Gopher

[interval1066]

Way back in early '94 or so gopher was a thing, that and ftp, of course. Since then I don't think I've given it a second thought. In fact, I'm having a hell of a time remember anything useful I found via gopher. I once gopher'd a complete list of internet hosts (ips.) I can't remember the list being more than a few thousand lines. That was probably the last time I use gopher.

Re:I miss Gopher

[Anonymous Coward]

Gopher is the way I found the first MUDs I ever played,....

I started with the internet just shortly before the web became common, so my first ventures were on Gopher. Mostly university servers around the world. They usually had an opening screen saying these were working systems and that they'd consider it kind if external users noted the time and accessed the servers during local non-working hours.

I remember I was once trying to find lyrics to Enya's songs. I was not yet good at formatting precise gopher searches, so when I looked for "Enya", I got back two kinds of links -- one about the singer and the other about anything having to do with Kenya.

Re:I miss Gopher

[Myopic]

I remember I was once trying to find lyrics to Enya's songs.

Ha! Nerd.

Re:I miss Gopher

[Steauengeglase]

Around 94-95 when I was in high school the library only had a few computers. There were PS/2 machines setup as terminals for checking the card catalog (logging out of the catalog system was considered "hacking"; ground for expulsion). Two computers setup for Lexus-Nexus and Discuss and tiny little PC setup for gopher that the Librarian referred to as: that Jughead machine and it was the only computer that had unrestricted access to the outside world and I think I was the only person in the building who bothered to spend any time with it. I still get a warm fuzzy feeling when I open up Lynx and check out Veronica 2.

Sweet! Vindication for Pointy-Haired Boss

[Arancaytar]

Now you really CAN download an internet, in the loosest definition. :D

(But it still won't fit on a floppy disk.)

Re:Sweet! Vindication for Pointy-Haired Boss

[TangoMargarine]

Warm up a Blu-Ray(R) disc until it's floppy.

Re:The Ultimate Lesson in Open Source and Standard

[cwgmpls]

In gopher, everthing is either a link or text. There is no way to embed a link into a body of text -- what is now called "hypertext".

I wonder if someday...

[calmofthestorm]

...futureslashdot.future users will be futuretorrenting the history of the www when it gives way to the next iteration.

Oh and we'll all be plated in gold, because that's what happens in the future.

Re:I wonder if someday...

[An ominous Cow art]

I thought we'd all be heads in jars?

I'd like to see the old GEnie and Compu$erve discussions archived somewhere. I remember asking a question on one of them, about a science fiction novel whose title I couldn't remember, and getting an answer. Now I can't remember the answer and I'm interested in tracking down the book again...

Index anyone?

[avm]

Is there a plaintext index of URLs this archive includes anywhere? I'm connected via 3G and pulling a 15gig torrent isn't feasible. I'd love to wander thru some of my personal archived bookmark lists and such just to see if any of them wound up being preserved.

Compression routine

[mishehu]

Since it's all text, I'm surprised that 40GB only compressed down to 15GB. I wonder how small it would be if he used lrzip with max settings instead... I didn't see mention of which type of compression was used in the short article.

Re:Compression routine

[Anonymous Coward]

Gopher can contain binary files as well. If the archive is truly complete, then it contains more than just text.

I recall finding a ROM site on gopher about 2 years ago, so if this archive is complete you'll get a complete set of Atari 2600 and Coleco ROMs free with your torrent download. (I think it had a few NES too, but it was mostly the pre-NES consoles)

Re:Compression routine

[Undead NDR]

Who said it's all text (aside from the incorrect summary) ?

Gopher could (and did) serve all kinds of documents, including multimedia files.

Anyone remember ARCHIE servers?

[gjyoung]

And i'm not talking Jughead!

Re:Anyone remember ARCHIE servers?

[mtippett]

Sure, back when people knew the IPs of their local archie and simtel archives.

Those where the days...

Re:Anyone remember ARCHIE servers?

[geekoid]

the dark, dark days.

I don't miss them at all.

Re:Anyone remember ARCHIE servers?

[Anonymous Coward]

I remember ARCHIE, Jughead AND Veronica... I think I also still have the uMich file repo uri memorized :D

Since the uMich repo went down sometime around 1999, I presume that huge Gopher archive isn't included in this collection? Of course, they moved it all over to http and FTP (and have since dropped those too), but hey....

Re:Anyone remember ARCHIE servers?

[Anonymous Coward]

I remember when simtel was reporting as "white sands test missile range"

Re:The Ultimate Lesson in Open Source and Standard

[Hatta]

There's no markup for hypertext in HTTP either.

Re:The Ultimate Lesson in Open Source and Standard

[blincoln]

I prefer to believe that Gopher failed because the world wasn't ready for the awe-inspiring virtual reality experience that was TurboGopher VR.

Re:The Ultimate Lesson in Open Source and Standard

[lindner]

Yes, the whole licensing thing was a total fiasco. The interesting thing is that some people actually did pay for it. For example Schlumberger licensed gopher which they installed on oil drills in the amazon connected with VSATs. And of course without licensing we would never had been able to coerce Adam Curry wearing a Gopher T on MTV: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dyxIwy1bW_M

I am

[geekoid]

I am a piece of pre-Internet history, you insensitive clod!

Re:I am

[Anonymous Coward]

I travelled here all the way from the year 1970 to agree.

Gopher lives!

[John Hasler]

...gopher was a menu-driven text-only precursor to the Web...

What do you mean, "was"? Gopher still works fine. There are dozens of servers out there. See quux.org or just install your Linux distribution's gopher package and fire it up.

Re:Gopher lives!

[daveime]

Dozens of servers ought to be enough for anybody.

Re:Gopher lives!

[mirix]

Are any of them secure?

I've been wanting to run a gopher server, for nostalgia, I'd just rather not get pwnt if possible.

Something that will run on openbsd would be groovy.

(I can't check the site because the router here at work drops everything that isn't on 80 or 443).

Re:Gopher lives!

[Myopic]

This is one time when security by obscurity will be good enough.

Re:The Ultimate Lesson in Open Source and Standard

[Anonymous Coward]

There's no markup for hypertext in HTTP either.

No markup, true, but HTTP does stand for "Hypertext Transfer Protocol." It was part of the design from the get-go.

It's kind of a shame that Apple didn't realize the potential of interlinking Hypercard stacks over a TCP/IP network. The Web may have been very different if they had - but then, it would probably be considerably less open as well.

Does anyone know why nobody added different Web protocols for other types of data? Things like images, sound, video, database access (e.g. Audio Transfer Protocol, Video Transfer Protocol, etc.)? It seems like they just shoehorned every media type (including - ugh - Flash) into "hypertext."

Re:The Ultimate Lesson in Open Source and Standard

[lindner]

There is a gophervr build that runs on current hardware. let me know if you're interested...

Timothy's article isn't ENTIRELY accurate

[Anonymous Coward]

"(gopher was a menu-driven text-only precursor to the Web; I got my first online gig programming gopher sites)" - Posted by timothy on Thursday April 29, @06:16PM

I was using GOPHER SITES via WsGopher 2.0 here (a 32-bit GUI program, way, Way, WAY "back in the day", circa 1994-1995, iirc on the dates) -> http://cws.internet.com/file/11502.htm

APK

Internet vs Web

[yuri benjamin]

Someone. Please, please, PLEASE enlighten me on the difference between web and Internet. Yeah, I know they're different and it's a matter of protocols, but I've heard this for years and honestly still don't quite get it.

I know someone else has just answered, but here goes:

The Internet is a global network of computers, or more precisely a global collection of interconnected networks that happen to use the Internet Protocol (the "IP" in "X over IP") to talk to each other.

The Web is a global collection of documents and various media files stored on web servers around the world.

The Web can also refer to the global collection of web servers which store these documents and media files.

In other words, the Web is part of the Internet, but not all of it.

Re:The Ultimate Lesson in Open Source and Standard

[nxtw]

There's no markup for hypertext in HTTP either.

The original pre-RFC HTTP states that a response is an HTML message.

Post to Archive.org

[Netssansfrontieres]

Surely: the logical thing for someone (not me!) to do is coordinate with Archive.org and then have them host it all in perpetuity?

Data Compression

[redmid17]

Is anyone else out there impressed that he managed to compress 40 GB of documents down to 15 GB? Hell I just use 7-zip.

Re:Shame on Slashdot? shame on ME

[silverglade00]

Dude, I heard you were new so I asked if you were new so I could find out if you were new while I asked if you were new.

Yes, pre-internet

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure, the gopher protocol has been around a *lot* longer than the internet.

Gophers have been around for thousands or millions of years--who knows? They dig their tunnels, which, as anyone can see, are tubes. As the former senator from Alaska has told us, the internet is a bunch of tubes. Well, those gophers have had their tubes a lot longer than Jon Postel's tubes, haven't they?

Well, there you go.

Re:The Ultimate Lesson in Open Source and Standard

[cgenman]

As a gopher user in the early 90's, my impression was that the web behaved like gopher, but with a working mouse and actual visuals. Gopher was essentially a way of networking old BBS's together. The web was like that too, but with actual visuals, real page layout, and ugly backgrounds.

I seriously doubt Gopher would have caught on to the same degree, any more than command-line interfaces being prevented from reaching their full potential by crafty GUI licensing. Gopher just didn't go far enough for the average person to find it usable. The web did. Any extensions to the gopher standard to make it achieve the same degree of usability would have to effectively re-write the whole thing to be HTTP.

The real surprise

[Lorens]

Is that there were still gopher sites in 2007! I RTFA expecting the real date to be 1997, but apparently not. How come the sites survived until 2007 but not 2010?

Re:The Ultimate Lesson in Open Source and Standard

[Vellmont]

but I think a lot of people thought Gopher could have become the internet had Beners-Lee not released a free for public use implementation of the hypertext concept.

Nonsense.

HTML won because Gopher had a very poor layout of elements in it. Mark McCahill thought that the more free-form layout type of HTML was too hard, so he stuck with the more simple layout of whatever gopher provided. I remember using gopher circa 1992 and thinking it was pretty cool (though difficult to navigate). I also remember seeing the web around early 1994, and realizing how far superior it was in about every way to what gopher had to offer at the time.

The licensing fees didn't help any (and were only for commercial use). But ignoring the technical failings of gopher in preference to some licensing is ignoring the major reason why gopher failed.

Re:The Ultimate Lesson in Open Source and Standard

[Anonymous Coward]

I worked upstairs from the Gopher team in the Space Science Center/Shepard Labs during that time frame.
I had no idea what was going on down there.

So how long do you think

[silentcoder]

Before you can get a torrent to download all of usenet ?

Or maybe just alt.binaries.porn.....

Still taught

[dargaud]

A couple years ago (ok, around 2000) I was in the subway next to a student who was obviously cramming in for some exam on internet protocols. He was at the page about gopher, trying to memorize its use. I told him "why do they still teach long dead protocols ?" and he looked at me like I was from Mars. Must have never used the 'net or something.

Re:The Ultimate Lesson in Open Source and Standard

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought you were joking.

Re:The Ultimate Lesson in Open Source and Standard

[Trepidity]

To be somewhat more accurate, it's not "now" called hypertext: it was called hypertext before gopher even existed. Gopher was first released in 1991, while Ted Nelson coined "hypertext" in 1965, and there were dozens of implementations before the WWW (the most popular outside academia was probably Apple's HyperCard, released in 1987).

WAIS and VERONICA

[Anonymous Coward]

Is someone still running wais in the US gov?

wais.access.gpo.gov

Pre-Web ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Http (1990) is older than Gopher (1991)..

Re:The Ultimate Lesson in Open Source and Standard

[kaszeta]

Yeah, I was going to make a similar comment, since I was a sysadmin at the University of Minnesota during the later Gopher years (what I call "the pathetic self-pity era".) Highlights included being required to run a Gopher server (since until late '97 all official department content was supposed to made available on Gopher as well as HTTP, we had this bastard of a server called GN that would serve the same content to both), suffering through the "Gopher World Tour", listening to several of the Gopher team carp about how this WWW thing was overrated and people would come back to Gopher, etc. I think the best is when, in 1996, someone from the computer lab told me I shouldn't be telling my users about Netscape, I should be showing them TurboGopher VR.

Re:The Ultimate Lesson in Open Source and Standard

[fbjon]

It looks like Unix!

Stupid joke

[dylan_-]

I got my first online gig programming gopher sites

I got my first online gig from Gmail!

(I warned you in the subject line)

Ah, Gopher memories

[Jason Levine]

Gopher was my first real introduction to the Internet. I remember browsing it in my college's computer lab going from link to link until I came upon one that said "Middle East." I suddenly wondered if clicking it would mean long distance fees would be charged to my college so I didn't click. That reluctance faded away as I learned that, no, long distance fees were nonexistent online (unless you dialed in to a modem a long ways away and then the fees came from your phone company, not your ISP).

Coincidentally, my father brought up the same "long distance" worry a few years later as I downloaded some freeware from a mirror far from our physical location. I had to explain the concept to him (also had to explain how nobody "owned" the Internet as he was convinced that there had to be one "owner" who let us use it all).

Now, of course, the Internet has had a hand in making long distance fees a thing of the past. After all, if you can chat online with someone halfway around the world for free or place a VoIP call to them without a long distance fee, why would you want to pay your local phone company an exorbitant sum just because that person doesn't live in your local zip code?

Am I the only one sick of hearing about this?

[Anonymous Coward]

OOOOO... Gopherspace.... I found a place on httpspace where you can get gopherpspace.

and some tubes...

[ClioCJS]

and some tubes...

My favorite gopher page

[Anonymous Coward]

I just surfed first time the Gophernet, and found my favorite page immediately:

gopher://gopher.kostecke.net/00/blankpage

"This page intentionally left blank. . "

Re:The Ultimate Lesson in Open Source and Standard

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, the birth of TurboGopher VR was the point at which working on the gopher project went from being truly exciting to being horribly, horribly embarrassing.