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

[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.

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

[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: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.

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

[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.