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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."

2 of 200 comments (clear)

  1. 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.

  2. 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.