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The Internet Technology

When was the Last Time You Used Gopher? 127

Posted by Cliff from the go-for dept.
ahuber asks: "As part of a class for LIS 391 @ the University of Illinois, I'm doing a history of the gopher protocol. My intent in this is to track the rise and fall of old technologies in hope that it tells us something about technologies we use today. So, my question to you is: When was the last time you used a gopher server? What did you use it for? And finally, do you miss the gopher now that its virtually gone? While some of you may think this is a silly topic, old and useful technologies are going the way of Gopher every day. One example from my campus is the retiring of the newsgroup server and telnet. Do you have any similar experiences that made you think twice about giving up an older technology?"
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When was the Last Time You Used Gopher? More

When was the Last Time You Used Gopher?

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  • The last time I used Gopher (Score:5, Interesting)

    by xagon7 ( 530399 ) on Friday February 06, 2004 @05:50PM (#8206723)
    Was when I wrote the "Atomic Mp3 Finder" about 2 months before Napster came out.

    It was a piece of shit, as I was still new to development, but was fun, and I learned a TON.

  • 1995 (Score:2)

    by ambient ( 8381 )
    The last time I clearly remember using gopher was in 1995. I was using OS/2 Warp at the time, and was downloading drivers from one of the IBM labs.

    I do not miss it. I can barely remember what it looked like...
  • I remember using Gopher back in 1994 via Lynx on a text based dialup. Even viewing both via text, the web was infinitly better. While it may not be a requirement of the technology, all the gopher sites I went to were hierarchically based, with no cross linking. Some data hadent been webified, so gopher was still usefull, but it sucked.

    Are there any benifits of Gopher over http/html at all?

  • I was really bored one day and tried to go to gopher.wiretap.spies.com, which I remember was a popular place on Gopher... in the last century. However it doesn't seem to exist any more. Are there any gopher servers left? I suspect the answer is yes, but I don't know where to find them.

    • quux.org (Score:5, Informative)

      by Hajoma ( 161358 ) on Friday February 06, 2004 @06:07PM (#8206967)
      There's a fantastic archive at gopher.quux.org . I don't think there's anything there which isn't accessible on the Web, but it's nice to see something useful on Gopher.

      The best thing about this site is that it's still accessible when our shonky Web cache breaks. If you're incapable of doing any work without the Web, at least you can read Project Gutenberg, the Jargon File, or the Internet Oracle archives from here.

      (BTW: there are a few broken selectors on this site at the moment; unfortunately some of the most useful stuff. Hopefully it'll be fixed soon.)

  • a bit of time ago (Score:2, Interesting)

    by eamonman ( 567383 )
    Jeez, I last used a gopher client nine years ago, when I was an incoming frosh in college and had no idea what http, ftp, or gopher meant. I recall that at the time, people were still using gopher for researching things, but that was quickly tapering off. We all were starting to use web search engines like infoseek or lycos or altavista (or was that more recent) to do research for school projects.

  • About two weeks ago (Score:3, Interesting)

    by keesh ( 202812 ) * on Friday February 06, 2004 @05:59PM (#8206858) Homepage
    I was testing out mozilla's gopher:// handler. It actually works :)

    • Re:About two weeks ago (Score:3, Interesting)

      by caseih ( 160668 )
      Until recently, BYU had totally forgotten about their gopher server which was running without any changes for the last 7 years or so. gopher://gopher.byu.edu. I don't know if it is down now, or is just firewalled off.
    • It doesn't work very well with the rest of mozilla, it seems - at least not tabs:

      1. In 1.6, open a new tab, go to e.g. gopher://gopher.quux.org/ .

      2. Click on a link and QUICKLY close the tab, before the new gopher-page is loaded.

      3. The gopher-page will still be loaded - and displayed in the current tab.

      I haven't checked bugzilla yet for this... (and on a more personal note: even though I have filed a couple of bugs recently, I haven't much faith in the handling of bugs; http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_

    • not quite true (Score:2, Interesting)

      by IMSoP ( 659204 )

      I was testing out mozilla's gopher:// handler. It actually works :)

      Actually, no it doesn't - try comparing this gopher link [floodgap.com] with this html proxied version [floodgap.com] - not the same, I think you'll agree.

  • '93 - back when I was writing pages for it. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Kris_J ( 10111 ) * on Friday February 06, 2004 @05:59PM (#8206864) Homepage Journal
    I was working on Gopher pages for the University Computer Club at UWA over 10 years ago now. Can't say that I miss it. HTML/HTTP is everything Gopher was and so much more.

  • Back when I was a Golden Gopher myself (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Saganaga ( 167162 ) on Friday February 06, 2004 @06:01PM (#8206891) Homepage
    I think the only time I used Gopher was when I was a student back at the University of Minnesota (whose mascot, the Golden Gopher, provided the inspiration for the protocol's name for those at the U of M who developed it). I think that was 1992 or '93.

    It didn't really make too much of an impression on me, though. I dimly remember that is was a very rigidly hierarchical menu-based system, difficult to use if you didn't know where in the hierarchy to look. But that's about all I remember.

    Wikipedia has a good article [wikipedia.org] on Gopher.

    • Re:Back when I was a Golden Gopher myself (Score:5, Interesting)

      by yelvington ( 8169 ) on Friday February 06, 2004 @07:01PM (#8207613) Homepage
      Actually, the hierarchy was NOT rigid. Any node on the tree could point to any Gopher address, so the navigational scheme could be a network and not merely a tree. However, text resources were by definition just text files, and were leaf nodes as a result. They couldn't point anywhere else.

      The big breakthroughs of the Web were the ability to embed a hypertext link at any abitrary location in text, and the ability to embed images (introduced by Mosaic).

      The Gopher model was excellent for a narrowband world. It was a tremendous breakthrough in a darkness where we all had to "just know" Telnet addresses like nyx.du.edu and FTP addresses like tsx-11.mit.edu. It worked great on a plain-text terminal. And it pioneered a lot of things that later made the Web usable, such as link-integrated search engines (Archie, which searched FTP archives, and Veronica, which searched Gopherspace).

      If the cellphone companies weren't so self-destructively larcenous, they would have used Gopher instead of creating that awful WAP/WML mess.

      • The big problem with Gopher was that the clients didn't provide an easy means to bookmark locations or enter URLs.

        Thus, at the U of MN, every trip into "gopherspace" started at the University home location and required to you to dig down 100 levels to get what you were looking for. And there was some pretty cool stuff there -- you could get into parts of The Well BBS, Wired, The the EFF, download Apple software, etc.

        But I think 99% of the students never got past the jokes page that was at the root level o
        • Wow...I'm pretty sure that the Mac OS TurboGopher supported bookmarks.

          I was really into getting a gopher server going a few years back. It took some work to even get one to compile on a current Red Hat system, and the setup is a pain in the ass compared to, say, Apache. There's been some resurgence of work on gopher recently, oddly enough, so it may be possible to use gopherd without trouble.

          As someone else pointed out, gopher would be *phenomenal* for cell phones. It's lightweight, it doesn't push the
  • I was working for the meteorology department on campus and building a tool to slurp up weather data from every known source imaginable, including web and ftp sites, McIDAS(*shudder* I HATED THAT THING) and GOPHER! I think out of the 50 or so sources I was using only 1 or 2 used gopher. AFAIK gopher is probably still used in meteorology.

  • Rutgers University in 1992-94 (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Unholy_Kingfish ( 614606 ) on Friday February 06, 2004 @06:02PM (#8206905) Homepage
    My first and last experience was at Rutgers University. At the time Rutgers had lots on info running over Gopher for school stuff. But even then WWW was taking over as THE source for information. Every Comp Sci major (back then it meant programming only) was learning this new language called HTML. We spent more time doing stuff with that than actual work. Not to mention some hacking of the schools network.

    Gopher seemed very antiquated since this new HTML thing allowed you to do the same stuff as Gopher, but also format it, use different text sizes and WOW... pictures. We downloaded this thing called Netscape and opened a text editor and went at it. Anyone at the school that had a "Computer" account could post these so called "web pages" to their personl storage space. It was a very generous amount of space too, 2 MB. We were amazed, we could put almost two 3 1/4 floppies worth of useless stuff there for everyone to see.

    • It should not be forgotten however that the original Mozilla browser was also a very, very good gopher client (gopher:// URIs); back when they were hardly any HTTP servers around, gopher actually bootstrapped mozilla into more widespread usage...

  • waaay back... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Balthisar ( 649688 )

    in 1996 was the last time I used a gopher server. Also 1996 was the first time I'd used a gopher server. To me (an enlisted soldier in the US Army) the internet was a brand new thing for me and I used everything I could get my hands on. I'd just dumped AOL (yeah, yeah, I was an AOL'er for a year, and that's when they charged per minute) for this internet thing.

    I remember that the gopher program for my Mac Colour Classic had a gopher in a really nifty pair of sunglasses. But it turns out I just didn't gophe

  • A useful resource (Score:5, Informative)

    by IMSoP ( 659204 ) on Friday February 06, 2004 @06:12PM (#8207026)

    I've never used gopher myself (other than for seeing what it looked like), but you may all want to check out Floodgap Gopher-HTTP Proxy [floodgap.com]

    And yes, you do need a proxy, as just about all modern browsers (yes, even Mozilla) don't render gopher correctly - compare your browser [floodgap.com] with what it should look like [floodgap.com].

    And naturally, the proxy links to lots of still-existent gopherspaces, for all you wondering if there are any still out there...

    • Mozilla Firebird 0.7 works just fine. The only difference is that it puts a giant honking message at the top to tell you it's a Gopher page, whereas the proxy puts links at the bottom to link back to the proxy.

      If anyone cares, I can put up a screenshot, but I really suggest you just go actually download Mozilla before you run your mouth. (Or is this firebird only?)

  • Two Days Ago :) (Score:3, Interesting)

    by HRbnjR ( 12398 ) <chris@hubick.com> on Friday February 06, 2004 @06:12PM (#8207028) Homepage
    Some people on a local board I visit were complaining about inflamatory threads being deleted, cencorship, and all that... so I was searching for good info on Canadian Defamation law, and found this:

    gopher://insight.mcmaster.ca/11/org/efc [mcmaster.ca]
  • Gave me the creeps.
  • It's been about 7 years since I've had a reason to use Gopher (a couple local colleges used it).

  • not so long ago... (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Zapper ( 68283 )
    'bout two weeks ago. One those "wonder if it's still working" momemnts. Any interesting gopher:// URLS out there?

  • 1993 (Score:2)

    by Pengo ( 28814 )

    I believe I was able to download schedule information on classes, etc. from our university gopher server. Thats about all I ever used it for.

  • Back when I was in college (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Smack ( 977 )
    I was home for the summer and wanted to check my mail, but we didn't have an ISP (back in 1995). So I called in to my local library's system, which they put out so you could use databases and stuff remotely. They allowed you to get into Gopher from there. I dug around until I found a telnet gateway and used that to log into my college account all summer. The tricky part was that there was no way to directly go to an address, by typing in a URL or something. So you had to follow links all the way from m

  • 10 Minutes Ago (Score:2, Informative)

    by ev1lcanuck ( 718766 )
    For the first (and probably last) time I used it to look at gopher://sdf.lonestar.org/ [lonestar.org]. I was mostly curious and found the gopher site through Vivisimo [vivisimo.com] It's pretty cool and works great over dialup. I used Mozilla Firebird 0.7 to access it.

  • how odd (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Tumbleweed ( 3706 ) * on Friday February 06, 2004 @06:20PM (#8207114)
    > One example from my campus is the retiring of the newsgroup server and telnet.

    Okay, see, gopher being retired is one thing - we have a superior (far superior) replacement. There _is_ no obviously-superior replacement for NNTP yet, and the only superior replacement for telnet is secure telnet.

    The interfaces of web forum software are still leagues behind that of a decent NNTP client, and what are you going to do when you need the functionality of telnet?

    Bizarre decision.

    • Re:how odd (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Brynath ( 522699 ) <Brynath@gmail.com> on Friday February 06, 2004 @07:05PM (#8207650)
      Ummm,

      SSH?

    • Re:how odd (Score:2, Informative)

      by lambent ( 234167 )
      Telnet is an awful, awful protocl that shound never have been implemented, right from the start. Unless you're running an extremely resource-poor platform and need remote console access, there's no defendable reason to use it.

      *cough*

      As for NNTP ... where else would we get our daily giga-dose of free pr0n from?
      • I'm not really into pictures with bullshit site- and phonesex ads on them, but if the web is your choice...

        Boobdex.com [boobdex.com] is a good start.
        And I like the amateur pages at Voyeurweb [voyeurweb.com]. I get lots of goodness from Coolio's Babelog [flabber.nl] as well.
        You might also spend some quality time at Domai [domai.com] or Kindgirls [kindgirls.com], which both have much free goodness.

        If you're willing to put your money where your mouth is, Hegre-Archives [hegre-archives.com] is awesome, as are Quantum Proadult [proadult.com] and Met Art [met-art.com]. Playboy's CyberClub [playboy.com] can keep a downloader busy for weeks.

        Ha
    • the only superior replacement for telnet is secure telnet.

      As you pointed out to another poster -- it's been a long week. Get some rest. ;-)

      There _is_ no obviously-superior replacement for NNTP yet...

      Well, let's see. Funny that this should come up in such close temporal proximity (there must be a less awkward phrase for this) to my bringing it up, but IMAP supports of a set of extensions to provide "bboards". CMU actually provides access via a bboard gateway to Usenet. This is *somewhat* more super
      • I'd say that it's kind of appalling that NNTP doesn't support compression and encryption

        My feed is tunneled over a compressed SSH connection to my upstream.

        It'd also be a be neat if PGP signature use was a bit more common on Usenet.

        That's becoming more common, except that some people absolutely schiz out when they see attached signature ("THIS ISN'T A BINARY GROUP!!1!"). Alan Connor in comp.os.linux.misc is a good (well, bad) example.

        The relegation of many NNTP users to mail clients. Sorry, but a

        • I've tried gnus, but not seriously -- the emacs mail client that I tried seriously was vm. I decided that the LISP-based code just wasn't responsive enough when my mailboxes got large, and that mutt tends to be more featureful -- and while I like emacs and tried the working-entirely-within-emacs approach, I've decided that many emacs-based apps just aren't as good as their external-to-emacs equivalents. I'm trying to remember my gnus experience. Either vm or gnus uses a bunch of weird font sizes and styl
          • I use Gnus strictly in IMAP mode, so I don't have longer delays that any other client I've tried. As far as features, Gnus wins over everything I've tried by a large margin. Every six months or so I'll get a wild hair and decide to try out the current crop of mail and news apps.

            First, I spend about 10 minutes with KNode, Pan, etc., and run back to Gnus - I really wish those developers would check out the competition from time to time. They're all nice enough, and easy to use, but lack any serious funct

  • Last time I successfully used gopher was college ('96). I have tried a few times recently because gopher was a little more precise than google or the like.
    Archie is the tool I miss the most though. Need a file, know the filename, archie will find a dozen places that the file exists. Now you are tied to ad-supported search sites that make you jump through hoops to download a file from another ad-supported site that makes you jump through more hoops!

    Data is disappearing off the net, and the data that is s

  • Example site I found (Score:2, Informative)

    by sahrss ( 565657 )
    Doubtless someone will come up with a whole list, so please be gentle with the mods, but I managed to find one Gopher site (viewing with Moz Firebird):

    gopher://gopher.umsl.edu/
  • Ok, I'll admit that I sort of went directly from BBSs to Netscape (the one with the giant pulsing "N", and hasn't it all been downhill from there...) about - what was it? - '96?

    Consequently I never used gopher. Can someone save me the time of actually looking it up and tell us what the heck it did?

    Or Archie and Veronica for that matter?

    • Re:What, exactly did gopher do? (Score:4, Informative)

      by dougmc ( 70836 ) <dougmc+slashdot@frenzied.us> on Friday February 06, 2004 @08:24PM (#8208273) Homepage
      gopher was basically like the WWW, but all text -- no pictures.

      Archie searched ftp sites for a given file. There was a central server that polled all the known sites occasionally, and it handled your requests.

      Veronica indexed gopher sites, much like google does web sites.

      Of course, you could have learned all this much faster by just using google.

      • Back in the day (early 90s), I used archie, veronica, gopher, etc.

        How cool was it that Arche searched "known sites"... hehe... Can you imagine... People would register their FTP sites with Archie so people could find their stuff (just like with search engines and web pages without the financial motives).

        It was cool. It was fast. And my WHOLE college shared a 56K leased line baby! BitNet anyone? The _original_ relay (relay@VTVM2)?? (I helped to maintain the full-screen (*gasp*) Relay "program" written
  • First began using Gopher in 1993. By 1995, the Web had taken over and Gopher was pretty much obsolete. However, Columbia's ColumbiaNet intranet system, obviously based on Gopher, didn't convert to a Web-based system until 1998 or so. So I can say I last used Gopher then.

  • Ground Hog day (Score:1, Offtopic)

    by Phillup ( 317168 )
    Feburary 2nd

    No... wait... that was a ground hog, not a gopher.

    Sorry.
  • I was comparing finding data using that new-fangled Mosilla, verses Gopher. I remember Gopher being very obtuse and switched to Mosilla.
  • I was using gopher some 3 months ago. Believe it or not, a university was still using it for their people search! I can't recall who it was. Although, around a year ago, Macalester College [macalester.edu] was using it for their people search. heh.

    ahhh, gopher. I used to use it a ton. Back in the day, the U of MN would run a free gopher client service into which you could telnet. I used to know of an 800 number that when dialed would just yield a telnet> prompt... Must've been for some companies agents in the field or s
  • Remember Archie? That was one of the first things I ever used to batch download porn. Ahhh, sunet.se...the memories.
  • Anybody remember Fidonet? Or UUCP?

    I don't use UUCP anymore because...well, it's UUCP, and I don't use Fido anymore simply because everyone's left the boards of old - and the only people left are the people who seem to make it "Fightonet".

    • For my sins I am BOFH at a small shop which has installations of both SCO openserver and UUCP.

      The combination of tracking down problems in UUCP and having to admit to my friends that I run Debian and SCO side by side is enough to make me a target of abuse!

      There are probably a ton of sites sharing dialup across a company of five or ten staff using UUCP to receive files from their partners, etc.

      Hell if they'd pay my flights I'd go onsite with a cable modem and setup a Linux box running SSH - never gonna ha

    • Of course! I used to play lots of turn-based games on a Fidonet BBS... gotta love it when the turns are transmitted through a BBS-to-BBS dialup connection...

      Person 1 takes a turn...
      BBS 1 dials up BBS 2 and transmits data... hangs up
      Person 2 takes a turn...
      BBS 2 dials up BBS 1 and transmits response... hangs up

      Think: FPS with a REALLY REALLY ASTRONOMICALLY HIGH ping!

  • gopher? (Score:2, Funny)

    by jforr ( 15487 )
    <crazed maniacal groundkeeper voice>
    You mean that damn *mumble mumble* gopher isn't dead yet? I thaught I gawt im wiph dah bunny c-4. That does it, I'm getting mydoom's gophinator 3000 and ending this once and for all. god damn *mumble mumble* gopher ruining my gauf course.
  • The thing I miss most about gopher is that you got to say that you were the "gophermaster" -- that's gotta be 5x cooler than "webmaster" any day.
  • My last Gophering of any consequence was around 1995-1996. Edmunds.com had a fantastic Gopherspace packed with tons of info on automobiles, mainly for educating yourself when buying a new or used vehicle. The gem was the list of exact dealer invoice costs on new cars, broken down for every option, trim level, etc. They really were just plain text files arranged by maker on the site, but they presented so much more information than Edmunds' current typical ad-laden web site. I'd like to see if they still
  • gopher://up-root.org I use it to list my images and crap that I would rather not have my real friends seeing. :|
    • I just used mozilla gopher and checked out the link. And what do I see?

      gopher://up-root.org/I9/sole/img/worksshot.jpg

      A post I wrote on slashdot in some random screenshot of someone's desktop. 'Why buy an ipod'. I posted it anonymously so I can't prove it, but I know I wrote it...

      The original:
      http://apple.slashdot.org/comments.pl?s id=90355&ci d=7797473
  • I'd have to say it was 1995...I think I was procuring some software for my calculus class.

  • "When was the Last Time You Used Gopher?"

    When Ma ran out of possum.
  • i'm using usenet right now, i've been using it since i first subscribed to an isp in 1995ish.
    • Newbie! I remember being really excited when I discovered "trn".. that is a great news reader... I convinced my professor to install it on our DEC Ultrix machines... It kicked ass for news reading... was my default news reader until Outlook Express and Free Agent introduced me to bulk "download and decode" options..

      I used to get my porn by downloading each UUENCODED (yes, UUENCODED) message and then reassembling them by manually editing the text files to remove the headers... Then, I'd run UUDECO

  • I used gopher to get access to telnet (Score:3, Interesting)

    by astrashe ( 7452 ) on Friday February 06, 2004 @07:40PM (#8207947) Journal
    My first internet account was on a unix freenet called Nyx, which was run by a guy named Andrew Burt at Denver University.

    When I first started to use my account, I could dial a local university number, and connect to a telnet prompt. There wasn't even any authentication.

    Eventually they closed that down, but kept access to the library card catalogue open to the public. You could use the card catalog to get to the gopher tree, and from there I could find a telnet link to Nyx.

    I downloaded my first linux distro using kermit through a telnet connection opened via gopher. It was the old MCC distro, which came on a series of floppy disks.

    For me, gopher was more of a means than an end in itself. I didn't spend a lot of time reading stuff on gopher. I did search for telnet links to nyx, which were always moving around (or getting shut down).

    I don't miss gopher at all, because you can think of a gopher menu as a special case of a web page. Every gopher menu can be expressed as a web page, and of course web pages can do lots of stuff that gopher menus can't.

    The first wave of consumer or hobbyist internet use was focused on shell accounts, many of which were on netcom -- you'd dial in with a terminal program, so you didn't have a tcp/ip stack on the computer you were sitting at, and nothing was graphical. Gopher worked well in that world, because it was something that a terminal program could handle.

    • I don't miss gopher at all, because you can think of a gopher menu as a special case of a web page. Every gopher menu can be expressed as a web page, and of course web pages can do lots of stuff that gopher menus can't.

      Conclusion does not necessarily follow.

      The guarantee that functionality is within a subset has value in and of itself.

      Gopher links are a single column of text without frames. I can easily navigate a gopher system with just a single hand on the arrow keys while munching a sandwich. Heck,
    • I had a similar experience -- I think it was 1992 or 1993.. I found a dial-in number for public access to the local library card catalog system (Running Dynix on SysV). After a little prodding, I found a way to get access to gopher through the system, which I then could use to jump off to telnet hyperlinks. I think their whole network was connected to the net by a 56K frame relay or something. Fun stuff.

      A local ISP was started a year or so later, so I no longer had to jump through hoops to get net access a
  • The listserve list I'm an admin for used to have its archives on gopher; they finally bumped them off in about June or July.

  • 1996 (Score:1)

    by RedRun ( 204496 )
    I used it to look for a job...which I got. I was a cabler (installed CAT5 cable) on my college campus. That job helped me get a job in the computer repair shop on campus which helped me get a job as a custom computer assembly tech at a local computer store which helped me get a job in an IT department at a larger corporation which helped me get a job as a programmer where I am today. So you could say that gopher is responsible for my entire career :)
  • I hope, as part of your tracking the history, you learn something about statistical sampling. Hint: polling slashdot is NOT a valid sample from which you can draw any meaningful conclusion.
  • I found out about gopher in 1993 when I was in 7th grade, shortly after I got a UNIX account. This was back when I was fascinated by cd ..; ls, so my standards were not exactly mountainous. This was before everyone had heard of the Internet, so gopher impressed me by delivering The Adventures of Huck Finn, Kanji Character of the Day, and e to 50,000 digits (which I downloaded to floppy and took home!). I didn't know about bookmarks, so I'd try to remember the hop-by-hop path to my favorite servers.

    In th
  • three years ago for a civics project, I used the CIA world factbook on gopher.
  • 10 years ago, using gopher on sunos at netcom.com
  • I read some of the posts and the wikipedia entry and started thinking..

    I've been looking for a secure way to have preproduction versions of my bands recordings online. FTP is ok, but most people have access to a client and guessing a url is not hard. If I could set up a gopher server with the data there and instruct whoever needed access that they would have to install either mozilla or a special client to get it, they could. Also since most people don't even know gopher exists they could do very little

  • Usenet and telnet (Score:3, Interesting)

    by dougmc ( 70836 ) <dougmc+slashdot@frenzied.us> on Friday February 06, 2004 @08:29PM (#8208304) Homepage
    One example from my campus is the retiring of the newsgroup server and telnet.
    This is a pretty poor example. Usenet has hardly died out -- in fact, I'd guess that more people are using it now than at any other time. The percentage of people online using it is probably lower than it has ever been since it's inception, but with so many people out there, there's still a lot of people using it.

    (Granted, many (most?) are using it for porn and warez, but that was probably true 10 years ago too.)

    As for telnet, ssh is much more like telnet than WWW is like gopher. I doubt many people lament the loss of telnet access (it having been replaced with ssh) ... but going from gopher to the WWW is a very different transition. WWW is everything that gopher wasn't, but gopher had a certain charm that escapes most of the WWW.

    As for when I last used gopher? A few weeks ago, actually. Somebody mentioned it, and I wondered if browsers still supported it (I remember how Mosaic would support it) ... and Mozilla does!

  • I am 22 and have only heard of gopher. Never tried it or even seen it.
  • When I started at Case a lot of the course materials were on gopher. Of course, mozilla, etc. came out very soon after (I remember running it my freshman year), so it was a very brief time spent with gopher.

    Derek
  • I used to use gopher quite a bit in 1991-1993. By 1994, gopher use had almost ended, replaced by http. I didn't touch gopher again until a specific problem came up in late 1997. I haven't used it since then until tonight (and I'm having a great time poking around, the mozilla gopher client still works).

    What I don't understand is why your sniversity is getting rid of UseNet. Dejagoogle might be ok for archival searches, but there is certainly a place for newsgroups in an academic setting. Slashdot and kuro5
  • It was the time I caught the ferry over to Shelbyville. I needee a heel for my shoe, so I decided to go to Morganville, which is what they called Shelbyville in those days. So I tied an onion to my belt, which was the style at the time. Now to take the ferry cost a nickel, and in those days, nickels had pictures of bumblebees on them. 'Give me five bees for a quarter' you'd say. Now where were we?
  • Something you mentioned about telnet going the way of gopher struck me. I find telnet to be the most useful way to check my e-mail. I've always used pine, and the fact that it works a lot smoother and quicker than webmail is really nice. But the university I'm attached to is slowly fazing out pine in favor of webmail and imap connects, which is really unfortunate, because I probably wouldn't have gotten into linux if I hadn't gotten used to the shell presented by telnet.

    Good luck with your research.

  • I was looking to browse and copy files bnetween a variety of platforms in a really friendly way that wouldn't show up on most script kiddy scans. Gopher was the obvious protocol, unfortunately the server was a WinXP box and I was unable to find an appropriate gopher server for it. IE & Mozilla still support gopher://, does Safari?

    BTW, for those reminiscing about text-based gopher don't forget GopherVR that came out just as http/html hit. An interesting experiment in 3D virtualization of online resourc

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Gopher left a bad taste in my mouth.... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by JGski ( 537049 ) on Friday February 06, 2004 @10:03PM (#8208980) Journal
    The last time was about when gopher+ came out (not sure of the date). The changes to the license pushed me from being a gopher enthusiast into becoming a web enthusiast and gopher-hater. By accident of employment I was on the wrong side of the new UMinn license, despite working on an open-source derivative that was going to be open-source itself.

    I had been working on a C++ version of gopherd and gopher back then. UMinn legal pulled a nasty one on loyal users and contributors: if you were a commerical user or coming from a .com domain, you have to pay us. They claimed to own the protocol so even separate development would cost. It wasn't based on what you did with it or what you added to it like most of today's open source licenses, just the "color" of your domain. Definitely an open license moving to a closed license.

    The commerical-academic-government balkanization was quite strong on the internet back then. No advertising allowed. You had to be careful about regular discussion sometimes (Will this post be seen as an innocent "product support" answer or would it perceived as disallowed commercial speech?). A lot of the nostalgic "gentility" of the old Internet was due to this kind of self-censorship.

    At the time the web seemed more (and unnecessarily) complicated as a technology (remember we had just ftp, telnet, usenet and e-mail to compare it against). However, more importantly, there were no 2nd class citizen clauses on the license unlike gopher+.

    The UMinn license changes pushed me to research web and html further, which I might not have done otherwise - which was financially rewarding a few short years later. I know other folks had a similar reaction and experience. I shutdown all my gopher servers and converted the content to html.

  • anyone remember spies.wiretap.org it was almost as good as the bbs days. that was the last time I used gopher.
  • yes, google it, all the answeres anyone would be able to give you here +plus tons and tons and tons more....

    and I repeat, google for: define: gopher

  • For several reasons;

    - Nostalgia :)
    - Viewing status/summary and log files on servers I admin (pages generated by dayly/weekly/monthly cron scripts).
    - Since it is not part of the usual ports used on servers, it doesn't generate much traffic, esp. if you restrict the IPs with access.

    Yes I know, this could easyly be done in HTTP/SSH*/etc, but it still works fine as it is :)

    * Used for sensitive log/info, though.

    Remember kids, security is not a toy. ;p

    --
    Honk if you like my spelling.
  • I used Gopher to get classes in college. Without it, it would have been nearly impossible to get into the high-demand classes!

    This was at Cal Poly [calpoly.edu], San Luis Obispo, between 1992 and 1998.

    A friend of mine showed me the basic technique, and I wrote some scripts to do it.

    Every hour, the school updated the list of classes that were open, and published them via Gopher. Classes were full, but because people added and dropped classes constantly during the frantic first week or so of each quarter, high-demand
  • Somebody thinks I have prior art, and I had to be deposed this summer. One of the things we did was run a decade-old version of Gopher for Windows.
    -russ
  • For me probably around 1996.

    I also remember using archie and veronica extensively.

    For the young pups, archie was a "text based" FTP search engine. Veronica was a "text based" gopher search engine.

  • > One example from my campus is the retiring of the
    > newsgroup server...

    Idiots.
  • When I started at WPI in 1994 it was "gopher this, gopher that, gopher is so amazing blah blah" and then there was "Veronica" which was talked up even more so maybe it was written at WPI. It had something to do with gopher.

    Anyway, the first time I had to research a subject I fired up Gopher, (not veronica, I think) and searched, and searched, and searched. And found utter garbage that had nothing to do with anything, (rantings and other nonsence) and I never used it again.

    So, my answer to your question

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