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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."
In a bizarre case of ineptitude, my alma mater (due to financial problems or something) announced they would charge licensing fees for the use of its implementation of the Gopher server in February of 1993. This caused people to worry that eventually the standard and protocol itself would also be licensed. It did have other technical flaws but I think a lot of people thought Gopher could have become the internet had Beners-Lee not released a free for public use implementation of the hypertext concept.
That move by the U of MN is a great lesson in how licensing can kill innovation. Standards should always be open and guaranteed open.
My work here is dung.
http://www.tekeeze.com/geeky/7-fun-sites-you-can-only-find-on-the-gopher-internet/
Includes things like Twitpher (which might not be working right now) Twitter for Gopher.
Firefox (others?) supports gopher://
I thought Gopher was okay, but not near as exciting as my first exposure to Amiga Mosaic web browser. After all, it had teh 4000-color pron. ;-) Plus exciting sites like this one: http://web.archive.org/web/19961114151757/http://scifi.com/ - I mean how cool is that? It's animated and colorful. :-)
Aside -
Looking at that schedule reminds me how cool Sci-Fi Channel used to be. Weekend Anime. Inside Space reports. Sci-Fi Trader. Sci-Fi Buzz. FTL Newsfeed. It was like a geek paradise for fandom. Today's channel is more akin to watching the TNT channel - ordinary and nothing special.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
On a regular basis? Yes. Than exist in barns today for special occasions or limited use, possibly not.
It has been indicated that more people know how to properly shoe a horse today than in the late 1800's. Lower percentage of the population, and not something they do every-day, but a larger total number of people.
I wouldn't be surprised if the total number of documents on Gopher continued to climb despite the percentage of content on Gopher decreasing rapidly. The cost to host has rapidly decreased and amount of content in general has increased significantly that the total number of items could still be higher today than in the 90's.
Rod Taylor
Is there a plaintext index of URLs this archive includes anywhere? I'm connected via 3G and pulling a 15gig torrent isn't feasible. I'd love to wander thru some of my personal archived bookmark lists and such just to see if any of them wound up being preserved.
Gopher is the way I found the first MUDs I ever played,....
I started with the internet just shortly before the web became common, so my first ventures were on Gopher. Mostly university servers around the world. They usually had an opening screen saying these were working systems and that they'd consider it kind if external users noted the time and accessed the servers during local non-working hours.
I remember I was once trying to find lyrics to Enya's songs. I was not yet good at formatting precise gopher searches, so when I looked for "Enya", I got back two kinds of links -- one about the singer and the other about anything having to do with Kenya.
Ever since the RSS vs ATOM war peaked (and fizzled) i've been waiting for a re-gopherisation of the internet, where files, videos, music, audio and pictures are all linked and indexxed by interconnected RSS feeds that dont include all the crud you have to wade through in web pages to get anywhere. Something akin to MRSS with png thumbnails and optional links to "buy the dvd box set now" where you could create your own Channels (feeds full of links to shows directly, or other feeds) and then browsable from your telly directly, i think i'm rambling
If you don't risk failure you don't risk success.
A funny thing happened to me a while back.
I was trying to build Nethack for a server, and it was failing linking on some missing curses library. So I did a google search to try to find out which library I was missing so I could find which -dev package I needed to install to get this library.
The first Google search result was... ...a post by *me* asking *exactly* the same question ("Which lib do I need") almost 15 years earlier on one of the linux newsgroups!
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
Yeah, I was going to make a similar comment, since I was a sysadmin at the University of Minnesota during the later Gopher years (what I call "the pathetic self-pity era".) Highlights included being required to run a Gopher server (since until late '97 all official department content was supposed to made available on Gopher as well as HTTP, we had this bastard of a server called GN that would serve the same content to both), suffering through the "Gopher World Tour", listening to several of the Gopher team carp about how this WWW thing was overrated and people would come back to Gopher, etc. I think the best is when, in 1996, someone from the computer lab told me I shouldn't be telling my users about Netscape, I should be showing them TurboGopher VR.