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All of Gopherspace Available For Download

Posted by timothy on from the gopherspace-is-negative-space dept.

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."

5 of 200 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Shame on Slashdot by commodore64_love · · Score: 4, Informative

    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).

    --
    "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
  2. Re:Far cry from "all of gopherspace" by Obfuscant · · Score: 5, Informative
    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.

  3. Re:Gopher by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  4. Gopher lives! by John+Hasler · · Score: 4, Informative

    ...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.

    --
    Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
  5. Re:The Ultimate Lesson in Open Source and Standard by nxtw · · Score: 4, Informative

    There's no markup for hypertext in HTTP either.

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