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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?
I remember Gopher well. It was the early nineties and I would peruse computer networking and programming topics but I also stumbled upon so many Dungeons and Dragons resources in my Gophering. I don't know if the age of the memory is tainted somehow but it seemed like Dungeons and Dragons players were big early adopters of the technology. I am interested in what other people found on Gopher. Maybe it will help me put my own experience with it in perspective.
I remember it, at 65, actually I remember huge batch only mainframes. On a more serious note, I have a lot of time for Gopher, Lynx and all the 'simpifiers', I'd prefer everyone to have knowledge and communication at a low bandwidth rather than adverts, emojiis (whatever they are) and pictures of cats. My vision, going forward is goodbye port 80 and port 443, let's start again.
On y va, qui mal y pense!
My first steps on the internet were divided between pages with hyperlinks, i.e. the internet as it is - more or less - nowadays, and gopher pages. Interestingly, I always failed to get the point of gopher, where "classical" hyperlinked pages made immediate sense to me. Same thing as with TCP/IP vs Token Ring: I instantaneously "got" TCP/IP, and only much later understood the point of Token Ring. So then - gopher: good riddance ? I guess so, yes. Along with set-top boxes, netscape, Flash, and VB script.
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
Gopher menus were like FTP directories with symbolic links to other servers. So lame Gopher was.
University of Minnesota, wasn't it? I remember a story about the end of the last gopher server some years ago...
I didn't actually use Gopher that much, though I knew about it. My main memory of Gopher was around 1995 when I was a research student again. I was interested in such search tools, and I remember searching on usenet for relevant groups. I was actually expecting a different one to be more important, though now I can't even remember what that system was called. However, what I actually noticed was that something called WWW seemed to be far hotter and more active than any of the systems I had heard of before that.
The browser was the predecessor of Netscape that became Firefox, but I've also forgotten its name. What I remember was faking MathML with some version of Tex or LaTeX to create my equations as graphic objects so I could insert them into my first HTML webpages. Strange detail to remember after all these years, but the main hassle I remember overcoming was getting the background colors to be the same so that the graphic objects (equations) seemed to be part of the text.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
the internet was not yet open for business. It had been built on dot-mil and dot-edu, on public funds. Programmers shared source code; if you needed something, someone gave it to you. A dot-com address was considered crass.
The internet was better then.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
I recall having a soaring conversation with a tech friend in a Seattle back-yard party about this rumored "new thing" that was going to revolutionize the world. It was like Gopher, but had the ability to transparently serve all types of media and links were network-agnostic.
Frankly it blew my mind, and I had some difficulty wrapping my head around the concept, but most interestingly, we both found Gopher as the common-ground existing paradigm to compare against the nascent Web.
Then I threw up in a bush, but I think that was the Jim Beam.
I remember picking up a magazine in the early 90's, and reading about the "Gopher Site of the Year." Which included, if one were to "walk" into the restroom in the tavern, the ability to read a limerick from my server.
Ahhh....my 15 minutes a fame. When most everyone didn't even know what the Internet was yet.
I fondly remember Gopher from 1993. Used it, loved it. Actually used it a *lot*.
"The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule." --H.L. Mencken
I remember designing Gopher sites in grad school... and during the course I asked my prof if he'd mind if I did some WWW sites. That was 94 and we'd had Gopher, Archies and Veronica servers around, oh, and wais. Everyone should check out ED Krol's the Whole internet, if you can get the 1992 edition. It is a beautiful description of everything that was out there. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1369118X.2013.808365
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.
My god - Veronica servers. I had completely forgotten them. WAIS also made it into academic courses and there were text/exam questions on what it was.
Mainly I remember it was often a pain getting to much of the information I wanted. The web was such a huge leap forward in terms of navigation - it's no wonder everyone quickly moved on from gopher.
#DeleteChrome
Some gopher servers still exists, I was too young when the protocol first became popular, however I wanted to learn about it so loaded up a gopher client to see what was still out there a few years ago, decided to repeat that a couple of months ago.
I used gopher on the university Macs. Not very intensive as the content was basically american centric, not sure how often I was using it.
At the same time I was admin for a few Sun and Dec clusters in the university. There I was responsible for WAIS (Wide Area Information Services https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... -- btw. another great thing Apple was involved in when they where young) an other text based stuff, that felt more "normal" than clicking in a "browser".
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
I got my first Internet porn from Gopher. I had no access to Usenet then, but one University offered access to Usenet through Gopher and that included alt.* hierarchy and specifically alt.sex.* hierarchy.
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 :)
Ask me a more difficult one, like
"Do you remember using an acoustic coupler?"
"Did you write the code for your final year project on an ASR33 teletype?"
"Do you remember having to write the bootloader for the paper tape to the core memory, using the front panel switches of the computer?"
"Remember when changing the font involved changing the golfball on the 2741 terminal?"
Alzheimer, hunh? Is dementia being good to you?
I did the whole BBS thing, AOL, and then figured out you don't need AOL to browse the internet. Gopher did not appeal to me, never touched it.
I refuse to admit I know anything about the Gopher protocol, as it will state how old I actually am.
>"It was quick, it was easy to use, and important for this day and age, it didn't have Flash."
Flash? I never minded Flash. It was easy to disable. And with extensions, it was easy to delay or remove objects too. Restrict animated GIF, and life was good for many years.
Now with all the Javascript animation, it is impossible to limit or stop useless and annoying animation that is incorporated into just about every website and all over it. And I am not talking ads.
Some of us desperately want browsers to add some type of animation limitation or control.... if it is even possible.
It was more a file sharing protocol. No html, but it was very easy to link resources of many sorts into a library a notch above FTP in ease of use. Oak Ridge, IIRC, had an awesome gopher site where one could get many tools and goodies.
Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.
87 comments and not a single mention of University of Pisa in Italy and their large collection of <ahem> photos? For shame...
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
I believe those were NOT bragging points then. They still aren't, in case you haven't heard.
WARNING: Smartphones have side effects--most of them undocumented.
Back in college, Gopher was my first introduction to the Internet. I remember excitedly clicking from link to link, amazed at the information at my fingertips. Then, I got to a link titled "Middle East" and suddenly got worried that I would get in trouble for incurring long distance charges for my college. I closed it down and left.
The next time I went to the computer lab, I had a better understanding how networking worked (and why there wouldn't be long distance charges no matter what link I clicked on) and explored Gopher further.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
I remember it, and it was pretty cool at the time. It had predecessors though - France had a system called Minitel that dates back to the year when I was born (1978).
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
Our university had a admission system and the library catalog that ran on gopher systems combined with telnet applications. It took many years before their new web-based systems were as good as the gopher ones were. In fact for a long time they ran the web site and the gopher server for the library catalog and the gopher side was faster and better for a long time.
The main university gopher site was running for many years after the web took over. I think it was just forgotten about. It finally went away when they upgraded their web servers back in 2004 time frame.
Ah, Gopherspace.
Back before the web, when the internet was just green text on a black screen. Back when knowing UNIX was the barrier to entry onto the net.
Way back when.... my internet connection consisted of a Z-29 dumb terminal that I had bought from the local university for ten dollars, and a 300 baud US Robotics modem plugged in via a home-made serial cable. I had a shell account on a server belonging to a friend who lived across the country. All I needed was a way to get there.
The local university had an internet dial-up, but it was password protected.
However, when you called in, they gave you a choice - press 1 to input a password and access the internet, or press 2 to access the library's brand new gopherspace-based card catalog system.
By accessing the card catalog, I was in. From inside gopherspace, I could head out of the university system and into other linked pages on other systems. And one of these pages consisted of a list of locations one could telnet into, half of which of which were dead. I figured someone had put the page in and forgotten all about it. No upkeep, no maintenance. No pruning of dead connections. And now it was my backdoor.
By selecting one of the dead links, it would cause the gopher client to crash out to a raw telnet prompt. And once I had an open telnet, I could head straight for my shell account on my friend's server, for email, USENET, or accessing any one of the various MUCKs or MUDs out there. (for those of you too young to know what those acronyms mean, picture Second Life, but text only.)
I exploited that hole for a good many years... sneaking onto the net to hang out with a small crowd of like-minded freaks, geeks and weirdos.
Everybody sing along.. THOSE WERE THE DAAAAAAAAAYS.
Does Morris still do summer courses for high school kids? I did that twice in 1986/87 which led to my U enrollment (and eventually a spot on the Gopher team).
The computer course was taught on their PDP-11. My first exposure to Unix and C. I made a little curses-based skiing game.
Also had a SciFi/Fantasy course. We spent most of it playing D&D.
Just yesterday some friends and I were talking about how much we miss Gopher. It had some useful advantages that nothing has replaced.
My family got our first PC in 94-95 and we had AOL, and the beginnings of the WWW. I had heard about gopher but never got to use it.
I remember a friend came into the Linux cave (current Linux was version was 0.9x) and asked me if I knew WWW. It's like gopher he said - only with images. So - yes - I know gopher. Looking back all those years - I wonder: Is that the Internet we all envisioned? I actually grew up without the Internet - learned "online" with commercial packet-switched networks that charged by the packet sent or received (though not me - we had .. ways) - got involved with free software, entangled in Linux and finally built an interactive web based online service that was used by half a million users. Completely without javascript, php, python or even an apache web server. Whatever you needed back in the late 90s - most of the stuff you had to program yourself. No yum this or apt get that. Most of my former colleagues and friends have dropped out of the rat race. They lost contact with the fast pace of the change of systems, services or programming languages. And you can hear my occasional rant about how it was all better 20 years ago. I guess we changed the world back then. But the new generation of hackers deserves the chance to change the world again - to their liking. But between us: We shaped the Internet, created the web environment and voice over ip, we challenged the foundation of the music industry with our mp3, we were the people that made what it is known today as "the Internet" - it's a tough act to follow. I sure hope that "systemd" is not the yard stick to measure our successors contributions to the digital world.
Gopher was cool because it was way easier to follow references to other content on other sites than FTP, even if you often had to download the content and figure out which app was needed to display it. Xgopher was cooler yet because it could display images. Then Mosaic showed up, and had the ability to handle many more data types, and the fuse was lit... In the early 90s, everyone who knew anything about the 'Net knew where the main gophers were. Opened up communications a lot, and was far more direct than Usenet, which had already descended into being mostly noise by then. Great way to share information, 'til there was a greater one.
Gopher was okay, but I guess someone had the idea to add images and html was there within months it seemed. I like the internet we have now apart from the massive spying and viruses. Games are more advanced, and if you like older games, you can still play them. Wanna listen to some Bob Marley? Youtube is there.
God spoke to me
I am not say that there wasn't anything cool, but that nobody I knew (all geeks) showed me something on Gopher that made me say "cool". Then I saw these guys looking at a dilbert cartoon on some browser thingy and I was sold.
Veronica was the Googles for Gopher sites. Used it on my 286 slip connection back in 93.
Gopher was how I expanded out on the internet beyond paying crazy fees to send internet email over Compuserv. A few local bulletin boards offered access. I was in high school, so I didn’t have anybody around to tell me what the point of Gopher was, so it was like browsing a very nerdy newsstand. Today I often miss Gopher, because it had no images, no video, no Flash, no insane page layouts trying to sell me clickbait.
Gopher Blue was the main one I used back then, even remember having to run a program to convert the 7bit ascii stream back to 8bit binary after receiving it from there! They had a large repository of AtariST utility programs! All part of running a Citadel BBS for the AtariST community in my area! I got access through our local university's dial-up system. Going from 300baud to 1200baud was a real treat back then!
Gopher was the first "search" thing I used when I got plugged into the "net".
I still have one gopher site bookmarked, although it's been dead for a while (and modern browsers no longer recognize "gopher://" as a valid URI prefix). I simply haven't got the heart to delete it. Of course, even at the time I added it, gopher was nearly dead as a protocol in general. I mostly only added it because I was astounded that I'd stumbled across a still-running site, and that my browser, at the time, could still talk to it.
This story was simply posted to gather evidence confirming the fact that slashdot is full of old pharts, yes? :)
> how many Slashdot readers today remember using Gopher?
If you're too young to remember Gopher, what are you doing on Slashdot in the first place?
Perfectly Normal Industries
I remember my first Internet purchase, in 1986. Well, it was sort of an internet purchase, and I can't remember whether it was called the Internet then, or the Arpanet. There was a usenet group called forsale.something, and it had subgroups for different parts of the country. One day I saw an ad from someone nearby selling a used portable dishwasher. I made contact, and I think I went to his house to complete the purchase (Amazon didn't ship across the country back then, and you really didn't want to send your credit card number by email).
We used the dishwasher for several years, took it to Colombia with us, and eventually sold it down there for at least as much as we had paid + shipping.
Of course I was far from the only one to do this sort of thing--that's why forsale.whatever existed.
I remember Gopher well. It was my go to resource for everything on the 'net from new software to travel weather reports. I kind of miss it.
The optimist proclaims we live in the best of all possible worlds and the pessimist fears this may be true.
and told me about this new program, Arena, which was "a kind of gopher, but with hypertexts". It was horribly slow, but it worked, and it was a miracle!
I never once saw it advertised despite being online since before the Internet was a thing. In the summer of '95 I taught public school teachers how to use the Internet as a part of a summer program and the instructions we gave included how to use Gopher but I never saw it used outside of school. It was on all of the school computers and the limited computer instruction given to students included an introduction to Gopher but no one ever bothered with it. Usenet, IRC, even BBSes were more popular. Basically, the lack of pr0n and warez were its downfall.
-==- Buy a Mac and leave me alone!
I even remember TurboGopher, a mac client with some 3d modiling, for no reaon other than "hey lets make these virtual things into 3d models"
It got killed like a lot of things got killed - something better came out, and at the same time people misused the gopher: protocol to DoS effect. Netscape pulled gopher: support in Navigator because of that abuse, and the nail was in the coffin.
Hah, I used gopher and Veronica in college on an IBM mainframe via Kermit. In many ways I'm glad those days are done.
I never found much on gopher (but never looked too hard) but came across hytelnet and used that quite a bit for a while.