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).

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"

[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.)

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:The Ultimate Lesson in Open Source and Standard

[Hatta]

There's no markup for hypertext in HTTP either.

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: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: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!