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

[commodore64_love]

Beat me to it. The summary should read "Get yourself a piece of pre-world wide web history," since gopher came AFTER the birth of the internet (1981) but before the widespread usage of the web (circa 1993).

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

[whoop]

I've been around a while, and I can't think of any time a Slashdot editor fact-checked, spell-checked, or proofread a submission. Look at it, they put the entire thing into a quote. That way they can just say they're quoting the submitter and that's what he said.

They might add the "UserXXX writes," part themselves, but a couple characters of perl could probably do that part just as well.

Re:Shame on Slashdot

[pizza_milkshake]

Here's my explanation in graphic form: http://parseerror.com/images/explain/internet-vs-web.jpg

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.

Re:Far cry from "all of gopherspace"

[rtaylor]

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.

Re:Far cry from "all of gopherspace"

[Obfuscant]

Do you have any facts or figures underpinning your statements ?

Yes.

In 1997 we had a 100Gb disk array holding the research data from our lab, all of which was available via gopher (and ftp, and the web). We moved to a 200Gb array shortly after, and then a 400Gb after that. And then 3Tb, around 2008.

Sometime around 2007 or 2008 the SunOS system that ran the gopher server died permanently and was replaced by a virtual linux server without gopher. Even without that server, I found not long ago that I was still creating .cap files -- which were gopher, as I recall, but maybe archie.

Quantitatively, online currently I have more than 15Gb of data for just 1997, all of which was gophered at the time. In 1998, another 18Gb.

So, I would say, had the gopher scraping been done in 1997 instead of 2007, the result would have been a lot more data. In fact, a few months earlier in 2007 and it might have BEEN a lot bigger.

Re:Far cry from "all of gopherspace"

[omglolbah]

Because as most users of the internet he wasnt accurate about the unit.

From the context one can assume (without that big a risk of error) that he is indeed speaking about gigabyte, and not gigabit.

Buuut, anal responses are more important than content. We know this :-p

Re:Far cry from "all of gopherspace"

[badboy_tw2002]

Stop making fun of him, he's not Turing tested yet. In a few years, he'll start noticing some changes and then he'll grow up to be a big boy AI that can interact with the rest of us.

The Ultimate Lesson in Open Source and Standards

[eldavojohn]

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.

Pre-internet history?

[nebaz]

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

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).

Gopher isn't dead.

[Anonymous Coward]

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://

Gopher

[MrEricSir]

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

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:Gopher

[Anonymous Coward]

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

No, just another ten years of November.

I believe you mean September.

Re:Wrong

[gyrogeerloose]

To a lot of people, WWW=Internet. Us old greybeards who remember when the Internet was telnet, FTP, e-mail and Usenet know better.

Re:Interesting

[commodore64_love]

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.

Re:The Ultimate Lesson in Open Source and Standard

[cwgmpls]

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".

Re:The Ultimate Lesson in Open Source and Standard

[Hatta]

There's no markup for hypertext in HTTP either.

Re:Anyone remember ARCHIE servers?

[mtippett]

Sure, back when people knew the IPs of their local archie and simtel archives.

Those where the days...

Re:Wrong

[Rene S. Hollan]

Usenet carried posts and articles in newsgroups. Synchronization took place via abstracted mechanisms, most commonly uucp over serial modem links.

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.

Gopher lives!

[John Hasler]

...gopher was a menu-driven text-only precursor to the Web...

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.

Re:Gopher lives!

[daveime]

Dozens of servers ought to be enough for anybody.

Re:The Ultimate Lesson in Open Source and Standard

[nxtw]

There's no markup for hypertext in HTTP either.

The original pre-RFC HTTP states that a response is an HTML message.

Re:Interesting

[cyclomedia]

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

Re:Wrong

[Alioth]

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!