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.

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: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.