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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.
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."
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.
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
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!
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.
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".
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.
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!
Sure, back when people knew the IPs of their local archie and simtel archives.
Those where the days...
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
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.
new furniture?
The original pre-RFC HTTP states that a response is an HTML message.
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.
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.