When was the Last Time You Used Gopher? 127
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?"
The last time I used Gopher (Score:5, Interesting)
It was a piece of shit, as I was still new to development, but was fun, and I learned a TON.
Re:The last time I used Gopher (Score:4, Funny)
According to Julie, she learned very little the last time she used Gopher,
but she was desperate as Doc and Captain Stubing were busy.
1995 (Score:2)
I do not miss it. I can barely remember what it looked like...
Are there any benifits of Gopher vs the Web? (Score:4, Interesting)
Are there any benifits of Gopher over http/html at all?
Re:Are there any benifits of Gopher vs the Web? (Score:2)
Re:Are there any benifits of Gopher vs the Web? (Score:3, Insightful)
It's simpler, and has lighter client interface and system requirements. It's pretty fast. It's easier to implement a gopher client properly (one of the reasons I liked gopher back in the day was because lynx was so blinking unstable).
Gopher... (Score:2)
quux.org (Score:5, Informative)
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)
About two weeks ago (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:About two weeks ago (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:About two weeks ago (Score:1)
Re:About two weeks ago (Score:2)
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)
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)
Back when I was a Golden Gopher myself (Score:4, Interesting)
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)
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.
Re:Back when I was a Golden Gopher myself (Score:2)
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
Re:Back when I was a Golden Gopher myself (Score:3, Insightful)
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
2001 (Score:2)
Rutgers University in 1992-94 (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:Rutgers University in 1992-94 (Score:2)
Re:Rutgers University in 1992-94 (Score:2, Informative)
waaay back... (Score:2, Interesting)
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
Re:waaay back... (Score:1)
A useful resource (Score:5, Informative)
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...
MozillaFirebird 0.7 (Score:2, Informative)
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?)
Re:MozillaFirebird 0.7 (Score:2, Interesting)
"just about all modern browsers"
So I suppose Firebird is out of date? I never suggested it was Mozilla...
Just because I insult you doesn't mean I'm not thinking, or that you shouldn't.
Re:MozillaFirebird 0.7 (Score:2, Informative)
btw, the only problems I've had with Firebird in a long time is its incompatibility with some Mozilla plugins (plugger, mplayer), but that seems fixed now.
Back to starcraft
Two Days Ago :) (Score:3, Interesting)
gopher://insight.mcmaster.ca/11/org/efc [mcmaster.ca]
Re:Two Days Ago :) (Score:1)
1994 (Score:2)
7 yrs (Score:2)
not so long ago... (Score:2, Insightful)
1993 (Score:2)
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)
10 Minutes Ago (Score:2, Informative)
how odd (Score:4, Insightful)
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)
SSH?
Re:how odd (Score:2)
Re:how odd (Score:2, Informative)
*cough*
As for NNTP
giga-pr0n (Score:2)
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
Re:how odd (Score:2)
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
Re:how odd (Score:2)
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
Re:how odd (Score:2)
Re:how odd (Score:2)
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
What about Archie? (Score:2, Insightful)
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
Re:What about Archie? (Score:2)
So will google --
Search: "Index of" filename
Example site I found (Score:2, Informative)
gopher://gopher.umsl.edu/
What, exactly did gopher do? (Score:2)
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)
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.
Re:What, exactly did gopher do? (Score:2)
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
Not since 1998 (Score:1)
Ground Hog day (Score:1, Offtopic)
No... wait... that was a ground hog, not a gopher.
Sorry.
1995--just serfing (Score:1)
3 months ago... (Score:2)
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
Archie (Score:1)
Old tech? (Score:2)
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".
Re:Old tech? (Score:1)
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
Re:Old tech? (Score:2)
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!
Re:Old tech? (Score:2)
gopher? (Score:2, Funny)
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.
Cooler business cards (Score:2, Funny)
Edmunds.com (Score:2)
Last time was YESTERDAY (Score:1)
Freaky (Score:1)
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?
Wow...gopher (Score:1)
What in tarnation? (Score:2)
When Ma ran out of possum.
usenet (Score:1)
Re:usenet (Score:2)
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)
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.
Archie (Score:2)
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,
Re:I used gopher to get access to telnet (Score:2)
A local ISP was started a year or so later, so I no longer had to jump through hoops to get net access a
Last Year (Score:2)
1996 (Score:1)
Sampling (Score:2)
Uphill Both Ways (Score:2)
In th
when I last used gopher (Score:2)
10 years ago, using gopher on sunos at netcom.com (Score:1)
Security through obscurity?? (Score:2)
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)
(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!
Never used it (Score:1)
CWRU gopher... (Score:2)
Derek
Late 1997 (Score:2)
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
I remember clearly when I last used gopher (Score:4, Funny)
Telnet and Gopher (Score:1)
Good luck with your research.
A few months ago, and other like technologies (Score:2)
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
Re: (Score:2)
Gopher left a bad taste in my mouth.... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
spies.wiretap.org (Score:1)
Re:spies.wiretap.org (Score:2)
i miss those days, sometimes
google "define: gopher" (Score:2)
and I repeat, google for: define: gopher
Still using it... (Score:1)
- 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.
--
Honk if you like my spelling.
Used Gopher to get classes in college (Score:2)
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
For a patent deposition (Score:2)
-russ
mmmmm.... gopher..... archie... veronica........ (Score:2)
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.
Usenet is Far from Dead (Score:2)
> newsgroup server...
Idiots.
Wow, blast from the past (Score:2)
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
Re:Gopher, eh? (Score:2, Insightful)
Suggestion: Don't waste your time blathering on about assumptions you know are assumptions. Verify your assumption (googling "gopher server" comes to mind). Else you look like an idiot.
Re:2001, actual usage (Score:2)