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

[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

[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

[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

[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.

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.

Pre-internet history?

[nebaz]

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

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:Gopher

[forkazoo]

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

No, just another ten years of November.

Re:The Ultimate Lesson in Open Source and Standard

[Hatta]

There's no markup for hypertext in HTTP either.

Re:Copyright

[Anonymous Coward]

Does anyone give a frak?

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). ;-)