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The Rise and Fall of the Gopher Protocol (minnpost.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Tim Gihring at MinnPost talks to the creators of what was, briefly, the biggest thing in the internet, Gopher. Gopher, for those who don't know or have forgotten, was the original linked internet application, allowing you to change pages and servers easily, though a hierarchical menu system. It was quick, it was easy to use, and important for this day and age, it didn't have Flash.
The article remembers Tim Berners-Lee describing the idea of a worldwide web at a mid-March, 1992 meeting of the Internet Engineering Task Force, at a time when Gopher "was like the Web but more straightforward, and it was already working." Gopher became magnitudes more popular -- both MTV and the White House announced Gopher sites -- leading to GopherCons around the country. Just curious -- how many Slashdot readers today remember using Gopher?
The article remembers Tim Berners-Lee describing the idea of a worldwide web at a mid-March, 1992 meeting of the Internet Engineering Task Force, at a time when Gopher "was like the Web but more straightforward, and it was already working." Gopher became magnitudes more popular -- both MTV and the White House announced Gopher sites -- leading to GopherCons around the country. Just curious -- how many Slashdot readers today remember using Gopher?
It was a cluttered messy experience. Seems to me ppl prefered to use BBS because you could get 'word' or pdf quality files.Basically, it was hard to read compared to even just very basic HTML. Telnet on the other hand was pretty cool and could do a lot, but was massively underused. Telnet could have been the flash of the day with full ASCII DIGITAL graphics, but instead of it was mostly a command line for boring shit other than a few server side games and apps.
"the point of Token Ring"
Enlighten us.
Slower than TCP/IP, but 100% deterministic network behaviour and speed.
Basically it's what you want to run your Nuclear Power Plants, live-saving medical devices and bizarly expensive "failure is not an option" Space Equiment with.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
It's still around. There's a small but passionate community surrounding gopher right now. A good portion of them are doing it to move away from the Web since it's become so commercialized and the technology is becoming so large and unwieldy that security is a real concern. Some make a gopher hole to mirror their website, or vice-versa. OverbiteFF is an extension you can use in Firefox to access gopher, or you can use a gopher-to-http tunnel or use lynx (not links or elinks). Lynx will even automatically use UTF-8 so you're not constrained to ASCII when you browse gopherspace.
I've considered creating an anonymous BBS or forum for gopherspace. The input links in gopher are largely under utilized; a piece of software that used those to accept input and handled linking in a smart way could get a nice, trimmed-down forum that still had much of the features you'd come to expect from community software. The best part is it's pure text and its limitations prevent a lot of the bullshit that's been tacked onto the Web.
That said, the community is super small and may remain that way due to its relative lack of maturity in server software. As far as I know, there are no packages/zip files/whatever that you can extract to a gopher-controlled directory and get an extra feature tacked onto your gopherhole. Until we get some fun projects like that, gopher will remain small. imo the best types of projects are those that abstract the server entirely and guide the user to manipulate the file-system, which falls in line with much of the content that gets served: often text files that you have a script generate a gopher index for as needed.
The cool part is you aren't constrained to a language at all. Serving Python over the web, for example, can be a hassle. Hooking a language up for gopher just needs the ability to process stdin (if needed) and returned either plain-text or valid gopher indexes to stdout. You could probably even write a gopher script in Brainfuck if you cared enough :)
You realize that TCP/IP is a layer 3/4 protocol while token is a layer 1/2 protocol as such they have nothing to do with each other really. The first networks I installed were TCP/IP over token.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
Token Ring ... "Slower than TCP/IP,"
There's no basis for comparison between the two. Token Ring is a link layer technology (ISO Layer 2), and compares to Ethernet, not IP. IP will run on both.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Yes, the Very Easy Rodent Oriented Network Index of Computer Archives did go along with Gopher.
Also Archie (file directories for FTP servers, so you could find paths to the file you needed) and Jughead, another gopher search tool.
For the old farts around here, the very earliest days of Yahoo when it was a heirarchical index rather than a search engine (or a white elephant) were similar to what you'd find in these.
fencepost
just a little off
What are you smoking. Mosaic was _the_ thing on the Internet. Until Netscape came along and created Navigator (using the same programmers). After Netscape Navigator, was born Mozilla Firefox.