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The Internet

What Happened To Gopher? 28

Posted by Cliff from the where-are-those-old-protocols-now dept.
nullspace asks: "Before the World Wide Web caught on, I initially browsed through many gopher sites. I have since then been distracted from those sites because of the growth of the WWW. The other day a thought occurred to me: whatever happened to gopher? Do people still run those servers? It would interesting to see those sites for posterity's sake." I remember gopher. I always thought the Web was a much richer medium, and that for gopher-like behavior you could always use lynx, that might just be my cynical side showing through.
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What Happened to Gopher? More

What Happened to Gopher?

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  • Aaaaargh... I hope you're just trying to be funny. Otherwise, moderate DOWN for being an idiot.
  • I got on the internet in the fairly early stages - 1995 I think - when Netscape had just released Netscape 1.1 (no such thing as Navigator then). And even then I didn't know what golpher was, never been to a golpher site, and never had the urge to learn how to access a golpher site. Still to this day I don't know how to even view a golpher site, and I still don't want to. Web-addiction.

    "I can only show you Linux... you're the one who has to read the man pages."

  • Raging Search (AltaVista repackaged) turns up over half a million [altavista.com] pages containing gopher links. Stunning...
  • I have some vague memory circa 96 of hypergopher being the next killer app *chuckle* Slow as all shit.

    Does anybody now what happened to it.

    out.
    d.

  • faq (Score:1)

    by millette ( 56354 )
    gopher://mudhoney.micro.umn.edu:70/00/Gopher.FAQ has all the details, and here is a list of a few publicly available servers: consultant.micro.umn.edu ux1.cso.uiuc.edu panda.uiowa.edu gopher.msu.edu gopher.ebone.net gopher.sunet.se info.anu.edu.au tolten.puc.cl gopher.inf.utfsm.cl ecnet.ec gan.ncc.go.jp
  • The WAP phone technology currently being introduced seems to have a lot in common with gopher. Not in the sence that they are the same thing, but in the sence that there is something a lot more powerfull just sitting around the corner waiting to come along and take over to an extent that most people don't even remember what was there before.

    Just a thought.

  • Wiretap (Score:1)

    by cnj ( 87028 )

    The wiretap [area.com] archives (after the opening page) are still accessible via gopher.

    Kinda makes one long for the olden days, no? Before cookies, pop-ups, censorship, and cease and desist orders . . .

    The days when Usenet was big, everyone was on Prodigy "Classic&quot and SPAM as we fear it today was still limited to the snail mail variety . . . ah . . .an Internet sin Corporations . . . those were the days . . .

    --

  • Huh? We do decide that right?
  • What the heck are you talking about?
  • Oops. Sorry, I get it now, I think.
  • Sometimes I wish I could post something and have an option to not let anyone moderate it up because I'd like to say something, but I don't think it's that important many people see it besides the person I'm replying to, and if someone really hates it, then they can moderate it down all they want.
  • Only a harvard grad would put footnotes in a slashdot post! (Sorry, just jealous because I went to Apex Tech; nothing wrong with footnotes, but you got to admit it looks funny here.)
  • Great point, but you forgot not only don't websites adhere to the standards [w3.org], but most browsers don't either.

    One of the things I find most annoying is that you need border=0 on images to remove that ugly purple border (on IE and Netscape), and the W3C validator says it's not a valid option.
  • Hmm, current moderation for this post is
    Score:0, Offtopic
    Someone's point was made for him by a moderator. Too bad this won't be seen by too many people.

    That looks like I'm whoring for karma and ranting. I wonder if I am.

    Louis Wu

    Thinking is one of hardest types of work.

  • Every major web browsers support Gopher...

    Not in my experience. I tried to get to our faculty directory [calpoly.edu] from a machine that only had IE, and it refused me, saying something about an unsupported protocol. I was stunned for a moment, then I realized that MS probably didn't care about Gopher, so why support it? Sad.

    And, yes, I checked the URL in the Preview and it works for me. If it doesn't work for you, it's not my mistake. TTFN.

    Louis Wu

    Thinking is one of hardest types of work.

  • Thanks for the CSO heads-up.

    Louis Wu

    Thinking is one of hardest types of work.

  • The days when Usenet was big, everyone was on Prodigy "Classic" and SPAM as we fear it today was still limited to the snail mail variety . . . ah . . .an Internet sin Corporations . . . those were the days . . .

    Dontcha love telling someone to hit Usenet, and they look at you blankly?

    It was exactly the same look I'd get from people in 1992 when I gave them my e-mail address.

    I told them, "One day, you will know what this is." I was generally dismissed as a crackpot.

    Ahh, the good old days. I had (and still have, it's plugged into my Linux DSL proxy/firewall) an DEC VT-100 terminal - ya know, the funkadelic 1970s model upon which every terminal program is based. What a work of art that thing is. Every now and then, I'll set the terminal down to 300 baud, fire up Pine & Tin and remember the 'net as it once was. Cryptic, slow, text-based, and free.

  • HTML is really a mess. According to the W3C, tags should be used to represent the structure of the document and style sheets should be used for how a page should look. Originally however, tags where used for everything. To provide backwards compatibility while still being valid HTML 4.0, the HTML 4.0 Transitional DTDs [htmlhelp.org] can be used:

    <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd">

    This declares the document to be HTML 4.0 Transitional. HTML 4.0 Transitional includes all elements and attributes of HTML 4.0 Strict but adds presentational attributes,
    deprecated elements [htmlhelp.org], and link targets. HTML 4.0 Transitional recognizes the relatively poor browser support for style sheets [htmlhelp.org], allowing many HTML presentation features [such as BORDER] to be used as a transition towards HTML 4.0 Strict.
    Of course, you can always use HTML 3.2 or HTML 2.0 DTD, but they lack features like tables.
  • One of my favourite gopher sites, and I'm certain it's still up, is the Internet Wiretap --

    gopher://wiretap.area.com

    Has some fascinating information.
  • Yes. [slashdot.org]
  • Would Gopher benefit of a Gopher to i-mode or WAP gateway?
    __
  • The unofficial gopher [ptloma.edu] hosted at Point Loma University is still running and actively maintained, and even has a list of new Gophers for 1999 and other still-functioning Gophers. The Privacy Forum Gopher [vortex.com] was updated just 2 weeks ago.
  • Gopher pages tend to be more content-rich than web pages -- Gopher simply does not allow Zero-Content sludge.

    ... I have never been to a horrible Gopher site.

    I can tell by this comment that you never visited the Gopherserver at the old Adam-Curry owned mtv.com (now metaverse.com I believe), which went up near the end of Gopher's numbered days (1995-6).

    This was basically a gopher server trying its best to be a Web site. Links to documents that weren't quite titled -- normally just meaningless filenames -- and many of the files were pictures. (Not useful pictures, either). It's worth mentioning that the only practical way to view this gophersite as it was intended (images and all) was via a Web browser. The whole intent was to use the gopher server as a repository and presentation piece for the projects started by post-MTV Curry and his associates. Of course, Gopher sucks at this, and they eventually ditched the gopher server (probably the same time they were forced to surrender the domain to MTV), but that's not saying they didn't try.

    If you continue to think of Gopher as it was when it died, you're holding onto a broken "good ole days" dream. You can't believe that Gopher would somehow have been a haven from rampant commercialism and irresponsibility in the current age of the Internet. No corner is safe -- not email, not Web, not Usenet, and certainly not Gopher, if it still did practically exist.

    Had there been no Web, you can bet your breeches that we would be using Gopher for pretty much the same things -- advertisements, used junk salesmen, and Personal Gopher Sites offered by ISPs to their customers. I'm sure we would have many FreeGopher providers as well, offering users the ability to create and upload content via telnet and FTP to their very own site on the Great Global Gopher (GGG). "Altaveronica" would still flood you with pages of directory links full of useless webtools and shopping gimmicks before you could reach the query window.

    I'm sorry, but you gotta get real.

    It should be noted too, that the same comments people make today (or did make 4-5 years ago) about the negative effects of the Web, were said about Gopher only about five years prior.

    The process doesn't stop just because the technology doesn't advance. Just be thankful your beloved memories of Gopher weren't tarnished by having an AOL gopher server.

    For all the web's faults -- which aren't really the Web's, but society's -- I have to say, I'm awfully glad I'm not trying to type this comment into a TurboGopher prompt window.
    --
  • Gopher pages tend to be more content-rich than web pages -- Gopher simply does not allow Zero-Content sludge.

    That deserves to be moderated up; whatever it's limitations, Gopher was just about always pure information. I kind of miss it.

  • IE seems to not support the CSO phone book protocol. CSO runs on top of Gopher and is not an integral part of Gopher. CSO is trivial to implement, no suprise Microsoft did not.

    WinInet supports [microsoft.com] retreiving of files using Gopher [microsoft.com], what the client does with the data is up to the client. Netscape, however, supports CSO.

    Cheers,
    qbasic programmer

  • Obsolescence, look it up (Score:3)

    by RomulusNR ( 29439 ) on Sunday July 02, 2000 @08:23PM (#962368) Homepage
    Before the World Wide Web caught on, I initially browsed through many gopher sites. Do people still run those servers?

    No[1], because the Web does everything Gopher did, and more, and better.

    It would interesting to see those sites for posterity sake.

    That's true, but no one's going to maintain one just for that, unless that IS why they're doing it.

    I speak as the person who personally turned off the law.harvard.edu gopher server, as no one had noticed it was still running, and it hadn't logged any usage in two years. (This was in early '98.) On the one hand I was sad to destroy a small piece of history; on the other, I was happy to reclaim some cycles on the primary web server.

    Kdt

    [1] Well, there are probably some universities in slow-developing countries who had Internet access in circa 1994 or prior, but their national technological infrastructure hasn't advanced to the point where the Web is practical, and they still maintain their Gopher servers instead. I doubt there are very many places like that anymore, though. I would start with a search for a working Veronica server. There are still some Archie [e2 [everything2.com]][ODP [dmoz.org]] servers in existence, so I'm sure there's at least one Veronica around.
    --

  • Flashback: 1994 (Score:3)

    by AtariDatacenter ( 31657 ) on Monday July 03, 2000 @02:06PM (#962369)
    In 1994, I was creating commercial and organizational Gopher sites. That's right, a paid... er... Gophermaster. Within a year, it really started to lose its meaning. As mentioned, HTTP does everything Gopher could, and much more. There wasn't any point anymore.


    The gopher sites remained around until about 1997 when an operating system update was installed. We didn't noticed that it wasn't running gopherd. Nobody else noticed either, it seemed.

  • Gopher is alive and well (Score:3)

    by qbasicprogrammer ( 200734 ) on Sunday July 02, 2000 @09:59PM (#962370)

    Every major web browsers support Gopher, there's no reason not to use it. Gopher pages tend to be more content-rich than web pages -- Gopher simply does not allow Zero-Content sludge.

    I see useless web sites all the time. Some newbie puts together a page with links to a few well-known web sites and publishes the trash on the World Wide Web, usually using a free web hosting service [freewebspace.net]. Apatheticy to follow the HTML standards [w3.org], unreadable fonts, annoying security JavaScript/VBScript/ActiveX/Java security holes, and eye burning colors are what make most of the web so ugly.

    Admittedly, the World Wide Web is much more flexible and powerful than Gopher. Gopher is inferior to WWW. However, with power comes resposibility. ~99% of all web publishers are not resposible enough to follow the standards [w3.org] and make operable pages. Too many web pages suck [webpagesthatsuck.com].

    Gopher does not give the publisher power to publish pages that suck. Gopher's directory listing makes this simply not possible. Of course, someone could host a Gopher site listing nothing, but what would be the point of that? I have never connected to a horrible Gopher site, and I have connected to thousands of horrible WWW sites.

    Gopher serves what matters -- pure information. The original version of Gopher, now sometimes known as Gopher0, supports [isi.edu] only a few data types, the most frequently used being text. (Gopher+ uses MIME content types, however). What other content types do you need than text? On the other hand, the World Wide Web is able to represent tables, frames, links, and many other useless features. Gopher is so simple and unbloated unlike HTML and the WWW.

    The WWW sucks, because it can. Gopher will never suck.

    The question is, will Gopher take off? Not a chance. Gopher will remain used by a select few, unlike the WWW. It will never have the trillions of zero content "homepages" and commericialization the WWW has. And frankly, I like it that way. Ever seen an advertisement on a Gopher server?

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