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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."
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.
So does this mean we're getting 6 more weeks of winter or not?
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
They teach us the difference and why it no longer matters;P
93rd rule of Slashdot: No matter how obvious my sarcasm is, my comment will be taken seriously by someone.
I remember when fingering the gopher was totally normal.
THL phish sticks
Sure, back when people knew the IPs of their local archie and simtel archives.
Those where the days...
I prefer to believe that Gopher failed because the world wasn't ready for the awe-inspiring virtual reality experience that was TurboGopher VR.
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
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.
new furniture?
Dozens of servers ought to be enough for anybody.
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
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.
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.
Where do the tubes come in? Are they buried under the superhighway?
They whose government reduces their essential liberties for temporary security, receive neither liberty nor security.