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?

Comments

Gopher and Dungeons and Dragons

[evanderburg]

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.

Re:Gopher and Dungeons and Dragons

[Aighearach]

I didn't have general internet access yet, but one of the local BBSes had a gopher gateway. It seems like ASCII maps for AD&D2 was one of the things we downloaded.

Re:Gopher and Dungeons and Dragons

[Z00L00K]

I also used it before Mosaic became the big thing on the net.

A reason why Gopher died was as I understand it that there were some licensing issues surrounding it. And the search engine Veronica went in hand with Gopher if I remember right.

Re:Gopher and Dungeons and Dragons

[arth1]

gopher is really nothing to be nostalgic about it.

Certainly not. I run a gopher server, serving up my e-books and readme's for my own software.

Firefox dropped gopher:// support, but you can get it back with the Overbite plugin.

Re:Gopher and Dungeons and Dragons

[Fencepost]

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.

Yes, and maybe

[hughbar]

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.

Re:Yes, and maybe

[hughbar]

Whoosh! Please accept a hug from 'an ignorant old fuck'. I was funning, hey, I even know what 'Facebook' is. Remember too that you will be 'an ignorant (you're that already!) old fuck' someday unless you'd prefer to die before reaching that exalted state. Normally, I don't feed trolls, but today, on behalf of my decrepit sisters and brothers and polite people everywhere, I'm making an exception.

Re:Yes, and maybe

[Registered Coward v2]

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.

It was pretty amazing how useful and fast, even at 1200 baud, the Internet was back in the pre-graphics days. Gopher, Fetch, FTP, Whois an Usenet, and Lynx as a browser that focused on information, not self loading videos, animated ads, and other bandwidth and resource hogs.

Re:Yes, and maybe

[jeffb (2.718)]

It's true. I even remember Nicholas Negroponte, at a CHI conference in the late 1980s, giving a talk about the future of high-speed network connections to the home -- he mentioned that fiber could gives speeds of more than a Gb/s, and went on to make the case (with a completely straight face) that no individual could ever use that much bandwidth.

I suppose I can't give myself too much credit for laughing at the time -- I was thinking of the bandwidth necessary to ship high-resolution images at video framerates, without giving a thought to compression. But even that long ago, I knew that anybody saying "we'll never need more than X" of a computational resource was setting himself up to look very silly in the future.

It's just a shame that so much of the demand for bandwidth (and computational power) is driven by the videos and ads we don't want.

Re:Yes, and maybe

[jimbo]

Ugh, Finger. I had a girl sleeping over, her husband "fingered" her university account and saw her last login had been after midnight from my place.

A lot of fingering happened that night. Next morning there was music to face.

Re:Yes, and maybe

[Lije Baley]

No kidding, the days of Gopher were the peak of internet usefulness. Imagine what could have been achieved if images, videos, and the Army of Lamers had never come! The dystopia we got is now requiring us to watch 5 minutes of inarticulate video just to get information we could have skimmed in 15 seconds. And when there is no video, we have to get that same text spread across 3 pages full of ads that each take 15 seconds to load regardless of your ISP speed.

When did the mother gopher die?

[shanen]

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.

sigh

[phantomfive]

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.

Re:sigh

[JaredOfEuropa]

The Internet was ours then, or at least it was the playground where we were top dog. Then clever nerds and businessmen ran with it and made billions, while ordinary people flocked to discover this new thing. That playground has grown to encompass the entire world, but our role in it hasn't grown with it, and we became largely irrelevant. The days of pioneering are over, it isn't ours anymore, and that's made some of us bitter. But I wouldn't call the old Internet better

Re: sigh

[brasselv]

I enjoy the spirit of your post, but I would disagree that the days of 'pioneering' are over .
from a broader historical perspective, the internet is still very young, there is still an enormous amount of stuff to be invented and figured out around it, we are still grappling to fully understand what it means to humanity, and from a business perspective its still a place where clever guys with some ideas and good luck can go from zero to a billion in a couple of years - which isn't the case in the steel industry.
its still quite pioneers time to me.

Gopher was a stepping stone...

[derinax]

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.

Re:1995

[johnw]

The point of Token Ring was to have plugs and sockets where it was impossible to put the plug in the wrong way around - or the right way around.

And indeed, you could simply plug two plugs together.

I used to do quite a few joint pitches with IBM sales-folk back then, and it was amusing to watch the show as they addressed the question of which networking hardware to go for. The plot was always the same. At early meetings they would say, "IBM sells both Ethernet and Token Ring and we recommend whichever is most appropriate for each customer. We'll need to learn more about your particular requirements before we can say which one is more suitable for you." Then, several meetings later when lots of things had been discussed, but nothing really relevant to the networking hardware the message would become, "Now we've had a chance to assess your particular requirements, we can say that for your particular case Token Ring would be better." It was always Token Ring, and never any explanation as to why.

The real point of Token Ring was that IBM owned it and they didn't own Ethernet. It set out to solve a problem which didn't exist if you designed your network properly in the first place (overloaded Ethernet provides poor service to everyone) and introduced far more of its own. Like so many IBM technologies, it was a mess. Don't get me started on APPC.

It's still around, guys

[Anonymous Coward]

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 :)

Re:1995

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

less free-form.

www was not intrinsically better than gopher. It won out because there was more free porn accessible with it.

Re:1995

[DarkOx]

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.

Re:1995

[msauve]

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.

Gopher was my introduction to the Internet

[Jason Levine]

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.