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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."
Here's your chance!' Get yourself a piece of pre-Internet history
I think Jon Postel is rolling in his grave right now.
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.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
you forgot to close it.
I remember my first steps on the Web, and being fascinated by Gopher. I am certainly going to download this stuff, there's history here, for anyone to be kept.
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
Porn, lots of porn. Also, not understanding why emacs wouldn't run on a mac.
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.
The web is NOT the internet. (Though sadly it essentially has become so, nowadays.)
Rhymes that keep their secrets will unfold behind the clouds.There upon the rainbow is the answer to a neverending story
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://
So does this mean we're getting 6 more weeks of winter or not?
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
I can look around the room and find hundreds of pieces of pre-internet history.
Is there any other point you can try and sell me on?
Yeah, the article poster is a bit confused.
Pre WWW history sure but GOPHER was a protocol for use on the internet.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
If Gopher might had became the Internets: Imagine all those VT-terminals that wouldn't be in landfills!
And we'd be working on Gopher-5, the Flash-killer!
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
To a lot of people, WWW=Internet. Us old greybeards who remember when the Internet was telnet, FTP, e-mail and Usenet know better.
This ain't rocket surgery.
Yes, rat infested they were. I counted a massive number of 4 gophers in my booksmarks from 1996.
"gopher://cwis.usc.edu/11/Other_Gophers_and_Information_Resources/Gophers_by_Subject/Gopher_Jewels/Istuff/fun/fun" (a list of cool resources...)
"gopher://gopher.lysator.liu.se:70/11/lysator-Science_Fiction_Archive" (I think this is where I got the Blake's 7 scrips from)
"gopher://www.library.ucsb.edu:70/11/journals/usenet" (not sure what this was about)
"gopher://wiretap.spies.com:70/11/Library/Fringe/Ufo"
I wonder if they're in the archive...
That's more the fault of the clients than the protocol. There's no reason you can't serve hypertext documents over gopher, and no reason a gopher client couldn't display graphics.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Wasn't the pre-WWW Usenet technically a separate network (like Fidonet) from the internet?
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
As much as I love the more advanced technology of the modern Internet, there's a soft spot in my heart for Gopher and the Internet circa 1993. Gopher is the way I found the first MUDs I ever played, how I found and was granted access (via telnet) to a Free-net (freenet.calgary.ab.ca) which gave me my own email address and access to newsgroups. Then came the Web, and Yahoo still looked a bit like a Gopher site, and I continued to use Gopher through my provider's PPP connection until it became a niche thing.
"In prison you just have to shut your eyes and take it. Here you have to shut your eyes and give it."
IIRC Usenet wasn't a network so much as local repositories which synced. Your local Usenet server would sync up with other peer servers on a schedule, I suppose a bit like a massive distributed email system. Some Usenet sites weren't strictly Internet connected, but many used the Internet as the means to communicate with peer servers.
Now you really CAN download an internet, in the loosest definition. :D
(But it still won't fit on a floppy disk.)
In gopher, everthing is either a link or text. There is no way to embed a link into a body of text -- what is now called "hypertext".
...futureslashdot.future users will be futuretorrenting the history of the www when it gives way to the next iteration.
Oh and we'll all be plated in gold, because that's what happens in the future.
93rd rule of Slashdot: No matter how obvious my sarcasm is, my comment will be taken seriously by someone.
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.
Since it's all text, I'm surprised that 40GB only compressed down to 15GB. I wonder how small it would be if he used lrzip with max settings instead... I didn't see mention of which type of compression was used in the short article.
And i'm not talking Jughead!
I remember when fingering the gopher was totally normal.
THL phish sticks
UUCP was the original method used for Usenet transfer, and was distinct from the Internet, but it was hooked up to the Internet at various locations to make contact with servers outside the local UUCP network. This was an era when email (transferred via UUCP) could take longer than snail mail to make it to its intended user (and the addresses were more like a full trip-map than just an address)
There's no markup for hypertext in HTTP either.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Wasn't the pre-WWW Usenet technically a separate network (like Fidonet) from the internet?
Yep, you're right. My old greybeard memory forgot that, although I always accessed my Usenet groups via the Internet anyway.
This ain't rocket surgery.
So, yes, Usenet preceded the Internet in the sense that it did not rely in IP, though both generally evolved around the same time.
But, there was a rather vibrant pre-WWW internet where the protocols of choice were smtp (mail), ftp (file transfer), and gopher and archie for repositories of places to find stuff. News could be carried via nntp (net news transfer protocol).
What some may not know was that sendmail could work over transiently connected points as well, rather like usenet. Anyone still remember bang path notation? One would address mail using the sequence of hosts required to get it from one's own to the destination, using names understood by each successive host in the sequence. One of the reasons sendmail configuration files were so horrendous was to permit relaying between networks using different host naming conventions.
In Liberty, Rene
Does anyone give a frak?
I prefer to believe that Gopher failed because the world wasn't ready for the awe-inspiring virtual reality experience that was TurboGopher VR.
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
Yes, the whole licensing thing was a total fiasco. The interesting thing is that some people actually did pay for it. For example Schlumberger licensed gopher which they installed on oil drills in the amazon connected with VSATs. And of course without licensing we would never had been able to coerce Adam Curry wearing a Gopher T on MTV: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dyxIwy1bW_M
I am a piece of pre-Internet history, you insensitive clod!
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Ahhh the good old days.
You post a question on rec.arts.tv like, "When does the new season of TNG start?", wait for the midnight syncing between your local BBS and the rest of the nation, and then you come back tomorrow morning to learn the answer. If you're lucky. Sometimes you had to wait 2 days for a reply.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
>>>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). ;-)
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
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.
Archie only predated the web by about 24 months and sucked by comparison, there's a reason it died off quickly.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
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). ;-)
"The Internet Never Forgets." Unfortunately.
There are a few things of mine in the archives I wish would go away too. At least they're mostly under nicks that aren't easily traced to me anymore.
This ain't rocket surgery.
There is a gophervr build that runs on current hardware. let me know if you're interested...
Then, in the Web's infancy, 2400bps data connections were almost bearable for browsing. I dunno if the Web "grew up" as much as it "grew fat".
In Liberty, Rene
Don't forget UUCP, via 300 baud modem, it could couple multiple nodes similar to Fido.
I killed da wabbit -Elmer Fudd
Someone. Please, please, PLEASE enlighten me on the difference between web and Internet. Yeah, I know they're different and it's a matter of protocols, but I've heard this for years and honestly still don't quite get it.
I know someone else has just answered, but here goes:
The Internet is a global network of computers, or more precisely a global collection of interconnected networks that happen to use the Internet Protocol (the "IP" in "X over IP") to talk to each other.
The Web is a global collection of documents and various media files stored on web servers around the world.
The Web can also refer to the global collection of web servers which store these documents and media files.
In other words, the Web is part of the Internet, but not all of it.
You make the mistake of thinking you can educate the fundamental stupidity out of people. You can't.
The original pre-RFC HTTP states that a response is an HTML message.
Surely: the logical thing for someone (not me!) to do is coordinate with Archive.org and then have them host it all in perpetuity?
Is anyone else out there impressed that he managed to compress 40 GB of documents down to 15 GB? Hell I just use 7-zip.
Sure, the gopher protocol has been around a *lot* longer than the internet.
Gophers have been around for thousands or millions of years--who knows? They dig their tunnels, which, as anyone can see, are tubes. As the former senator from Alaska has told us, the internet is a bunch of tubes. Well, those gophers have had their tubes a lot longer than Jon Postel's tubes, haven't they?
Well, there you go.
As a gopher user in the early 90's, my impression was that the web behaved like gopher, but with a working mouse and actual visuals. Gopher was essentially a way of networking old BBS's together. The web was like that too, but with actual visuals, real page layout, and ugly backgrounds.
I seriously doubt Gopher would have caught on to the same degree, any more than command-line interfaces being prevented from reaching their full potential by crafty GUI licensing. Gopher just didn't go far enough for the average person to find it usable. The web did. Any extensions to the gopher standard to make it achieve the same degree of usability would have to effectively re-write the whole thing to be HTTP.
The ______ Agenda
Is that there were still gopher sites in 2007! I RTFA expecting the real date to be 1997, but apparently not. How come the sites survived until 2007 but not 2010?
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.
Nonsense.
HTML won because Gopher had a very poor layout of elements in it. Mark McCahill thought that the more free-form layout type of HTML was too hard, so he stuck with the more simple layout of whatever gopher provided. I remember using gopher circa 1992 and thinking it was pretty cool (though difficult to navigate). I also remember seeing the web around early 1994, and realizing how far superior it was in about every way to what gopher had to offer at the time.
The licensing fees didn't help any (and were only for commercial use). But ignoring the technical failings of gopher in preference to some licensing is ignoring the major reason why gopher failed.
AccountKiller
Before you can get a torrent to download all of usenet ?
Or maybe just alt.binaries.porn.....
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
And to us real old greybeards, going online used to be BBS...remember BIX?
(For you lawn-squatting youngsters: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte_Information_Exchange)
A couple years ago (ok, around 2000) I was in the subway next to a student who was obviously cramming in for some exam on internet protocols. He was at the page about gopher, trying to memorize its use. I told him "why do they still teach long dead protocols ?" and he looked at me like I was from Mars. Must have never used the 'net or something.
Non-Linux Penguins ?
To be somewhat more accurate, it's not "now" called hypertext: it was called hypertext before gopher even existed. Gopher was first released in 1991, while Ted Nelson coined "hypertext" in 1965, and there were dozens of implementations before the WWW (the most popular outside academia was probably Apple's HyperCard, released in 1987).
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
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.
It looks like Unix!
True confidence comes not from realising you are as good as your peers, but that your peers are as bad as you are.
I got my first online gig from Gmail!
(I warned you in the subject line)
Igor Presnyakov stole my hat
Feh, gerroff my lawn. I remember having a fast 1200 bps connection. It was just soo much better than the 300 bps connection for anything, although I could use the same acoustic coupler for either the fast or slow networking.
Gopher was my first real introduction to the Internet. I remember browsing it in my college's computer lab going from link to link until I came upon one that said "Middle East." I suddenly wondered if clicking it would mean long distance fees would be charged to my college so I didn't click. That reluctance faded away as I learned that, no, long distance fees were nonexistent online (unless you dialed in to a modem a long ways away and then the fees came from your phone company, not your ISP).
Coincidentally, my father brought up the same "long distance" worry a few years later as I downloaded some freeware from a mirror far from our physical location. I had to explain the concept to him (also had to explain how nobody "owned" the Internet as he was convinced that there had to be one "owner" who let us use it all).
Now, of course, the Internet has had a hand in making long distance fees a thing of the past. After all, if you can chat online with someone halfway around the world for free or place a VoIP call to them without a long distance fee, why would you want to pay your local phone company an exorbitant sum just because that person doesn't live in your local zip code?
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Actually, I found that the most reliable way to get the answer was to post something wrong in a conditional format: "The new season of TNG starts August 3, doesn't it?" Possibly dropping the conditional format would have worked even better, but I didn't want to deliberately post false statements.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
The neat thing about the acoustic coupler was that I could whistle the right note and it would take it as an attempt to connect. I enjoyed playing with the thing's little mind, fooling it into thinking it was getting into a meaningful relationship with something.
That's what I missed when I skipped 1200 entirely and went straight to 2400. Man, that was speed, at least in those days.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
And to us real old greybeards, going online used to be BBS...remember BIX?
I never used BIX but I used the local dial-up BBSs and FidoNet a lot. Also AOL when it was still called AppleLink.
This ain't rocket surgery.
So did you get your answer in old newsgroup thread?
In July O7, I got a mac pro. There's no punchline. Just endless joy and wonder.
and some tubes...
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
i spent years looking for a multiplayer nethack... boy did i feel dumb... i wrote a blog about it, but it wont post for a few weeks [future dated]: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com/2010/05/20/journal-computer-old-school-computing-tribute-to-nethack-i-used-to-look-for-the-net-in-nethack-but-never-found-it/
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com