9 ms·

The Rise and Fall of the Gopher Protocol

235 points by lindner 10y ago

lindner 10y ago
Lots of photos and quotes from the original Gopher team on this long form article.
runnr_az 10y ago
Interesting! I guess I knew the basic outlines of that story, having been an internet user in 1993... but it's a neat story. Good work, guys!
dmd 10y ago
> “I still remember a woman in pumps jumping up and down and shouting, ‘You can’t do that!’ ” > Among the team's offenses: Gopher didn’t use a mainframe computer and its server-client setup empowered anyone with a PC, not a central authority. File this under "straw-man responses that happened in their feverish anti-establishment imaginations."
- falcolas 10y ago
  Source? Context? Authority even?
- lindner 10y ago
  Not sure what dmd is implying here. But I will say that the committee was looking at using either X.500 or CSO protocols instead. Thus it would rely on a centralized authority and a publishing model that would not allow for individuals to run their own servers. Also remember that this was the old internet where we didn't have NAT or really any firewalling. Most of the University of Minnesota's class B was open to the world at the time. In fact I used to send email directly to my workstation instead of the central mail host to avoid delays..
- x2398dh1 10y ago
  Actually, the article very accurately describes exactly how the University of Minnesota works with surprisingly vivid realism. It's likely that the department was receiving significant funding from companies asking it to do mainframe research of some kind. Working on what were considered "toys," at the time probably would have looked extremely bad. Now does this mean that Gopher would have, "won out," over the WWW? No. But the description holds.
nemo44x 10y ago
Does anyone have a list of modern alternative (experimental even) protocols out there?
- lindner 10y ago
  The recent Decentralized Web Summit touched on a number of alternates: http://www.decentralizedweb.net/ http://www.decentralizedweb.net/ Interplanetary File System (IPFS) was discussed quite a bit. NameCoin was the most popular DNS replacement. ZeroNet was a really interesting project that does all of the above. http://ipfs.io/ http://ipfs.io/ http://namecoin.info/ http://namecoin.info/ http://zeronet.io/ http://zeronet.io/
  - nickpsecurity 10y ago
    I also collect old models, centralized or not, in case they're useful in modern situations (esp intranet) for reliability or security especially. What do you think of Tannenbaum et al's Globe model as WWW alternative? https://cds.cern.ch/record/400321/files/p117.pdf https://cds.cern.ch/record/400321/files/p117.pdf I thought it was an interesting design that provided nice way of reducing abstraction gaps and rework in the various layers/techs. They integrated it with their Amoeba OS that ran on cluster of workstations w/ single, system image.
    - lindner 10y ago
      Wasn't familiar with this so I skimmed the IEEE paper: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/articleDetails.jsp?arnumber=749137 http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/articleDetails.jsp?arnumber=7... Interesting that it references the Legion OS work that Greg Lindahl spoke about at the Summit: http://legion.virginia.edu/ http://legion.virginia.edu/ At first glance Globe feels like a low-level solution for the problem. Mapping objects to binaries via a broker and all that. The web we have today solved much of the issues in other ways. Anycast DNS and CDNs allow for content distribution. Storing state in cookies allows for Operational transform and other eventually consistent techniques. Thanks for the reference and connecting a few dots!
- 10y ago
protomyth 10y ago
"Eventually, though, the U did want some money — for itself. At GopherCon ’93, Yen announced that for-profit Gopher users would need to pay the U a licensing fee: hundreds or thousands of dollars, depending on the size and nature of their business." I wonder how many futures have been destroyed from the desire to profit off the eating of the seeds instead of fruit?
- lindner 10y ago
  In hindsight it was a stupid limiting move. Yes, we did get the Gopher T-shirt on MTV and a number of companies did end up paying. I was even loaned out for a few weeks to Schlumberger to assist with putting Gopher servers on Oil Platforms. But it was optimizing for a local maxima. The damage was done, the community was broken.
- joezydeco 10y ago
  I'm sure UIUC could chime in on that w/Mosaic.
  - sevensor 10y ago
    Incidentally, when I matriculated at UIUC in 1997, most of the computer-lab Macs ran NCSA Mosaic. (The PCs and UNIX machines had Netscape.) I remember receiving some materials on internet resources when I got to the dorms. At the time, many freshmen required instructions on how to use the internet. These materials had been prepared a few years earlier and still included references to Gopher.
- x2398dh1 10y ago
  The University of Minnesota office of commercialization of technology does this habitually, asking for far too much money from startup entrepreneurs. Many of the academians have no idea how business works, and don't care. 90% of their success has come from one patent. So from the standpoint of this one institution, you could actually answer that question by auditing their performance over the past. On the other hand, it is a publicly funded institution, funded by taxes and student fees. So one has to also ask if it would be fair for a small few having little to do with the University should be able to profit off of investments made by public dollars and overly high student debt.
wolfgangh 10y ago
I miss Gopher. I remember when the Gopher sites started to display: "This service has been discontinued. Please use WWW instead". I was completely disappointed.
- x2398dh1 10y ago
  Actually there are still a number of Gopher servers in operation, and you can use Firefox to visit them.
  - vmorgulis 10y ago
    "All the gopher servers (that we know of)" http://gopher.floodgap.com/gopher/gw?gopher://gopher.floodgap.com:70/1/world http://gopher.floodgap.com/gopher/gw?gopher://gopher.floodga... SDF still provides a gopherspace inside its free shell: http://sdf.org/?tutorials/gopher http://sdf.org/?tutorials/gopher
zeveb 10y ago
> To the curious who stayed behind, Berners-Lee explained that the Web could be used to connect all the information on the internet through hyperlinks. You could click on a word or a phrase in a document and immediately retrieve a related document, click again on a phrase in that document, and so on. It acted like a web laid over the internet, so you could spider from one source of information to another on nearly invisible threads. One of the saddest things about the modern Internet is how little hypertext is used. As an example, I would have expected, 'Mark McCahill' to link to his personal or academic site[0], 'San Diego' to link to the city government's site[1], 'Hyatt Islandia' to link to that hotel's site [2] (perhaps with a note that its name has changed), and 'Mission Bay' to link to an appropriate page [3] — and that's in the first paragraph alone. It's also interesting how those slides from 1992 look current as of 2016: flat, bullet-pointed, sans-serif font. > But 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. It was “as though all of TV was PBS,” Lindner says. “No commercials.” Those really were the days. I remember the Canter & Siegel spam, and how appalled we all were to see it. The Internet then was more genteel. Honestly, I wish it were still non-commercial: available to be used by companies (as it was even in the 90s), but not as an advertising medium. > At GopherCon ’93, Yen announced that for-profit Gopher users would need to pay the U a licensing fee: hundreds or thousands of dollars, depending on the size and nature of their business. Many users felt betrayed. In the open-source computing spirit of the day, they had contributed code to Gopher, helping the team keep up with the times. Now they were being asked to pony up. As much as it's become fashionable to group-hate esr the last decade or so, I think that it's important to recognise his major contribution: persuading folks the free software (under a different name) can be good for business. Imagine if the university had kept Gopher as GPLed software, rather than demanding money from its users. > At its peak, the Mother Gopher consisted of 10 Apple IIci computers. But when it was finally euthanized, who knows what shape it was in. There was no ceremony. Nothing was carted off to a museum. Gopherspace simply became emptier, and the world without the Web became harder to imagine. That's definitely sad. We need to do a better job of honouring our history and marking important events. Even in the late 90s or early 2000s, folks ought to have recognised the historic import of gopher. [0] https://fds.duke.edu/db/aas/ISIS/faculty/mark.mccahill https://fds.duke.edu/db/aas/ISIS/faculty/mark.mccahill [1] https://www.sandiego.gov/ https://www.sandiego.gov/ [2] http://missionbay.regency.hyatt.com/en/hotel/home.html http://missionbay.regency.hyatt.com/en/hotel/home.html [3] https://www.sandiego.gov/park-and-recreation/parks/regional/missionbay https://www.sandiego.gov/park-and-recreation/parks/regional/...
vmorgulis 10y ago
Gopher is still alive :) http://gopher.floodgap.com/gopher/gw http://gopher.floodgap.com/gopher/gw Veronica-2 is the gopherspace search engine: http://gopher.floodgap.com/gopher/gw?ss=gopher%3A%2F%2Fgopher.floodgap.com%3A70%2F7%2Fv2%2Fvs&sq=McCahill http://gopher.floodgap.com/gopher/gw?ss=gopher%3A%2F%2Fgophe...
- Jaruzel 10y ago
  Inspired by Cameron Kaiser's (and others) ongoing work to keep Gopher alive, I spent a good few months this year writing a new Windows client for it: http://www.weegeeks.com/upload/Jar-Gopher-Browser-Full-Screenshots.jpg http://www.weegeeks.com/upload/Jar-Gopher-Browser-Full-Scree... Unfortunately real life has got in the way, and I've not found time to release it yet.
  - zafiro17 10y ago
    Not sure how you'd visit gopher sites in Windows. Add the Overbite Firefox plugin available at Floodgap, I suppose. On Unix/Linux "forg" is really nice on the GUI side, and lynx is your best bet at the CLI. Although you'll find the original gopher client in a lot of repos too - all derivatives of Debian/Ubuntu and FreeBSD, at least.
    - Jaruzel 10y ago
      > Not sure how you'd visit gopher sites in Windows. By using a windows Gopher client. There are several, but mostly outdated. Which is why I have written a new one. I guess you didn't check the screenshot I posted.
- spc476 10y ago
  And there are even blogs (known as phlogs) in gopher. After reading one (gopher://sdf.org/1/users/jstg/phlog) I was motivated enough to modify my blogging engine (https://github.com/spc476/mod_blog https://github.com/spc476/mod_blog) to support gopher. The gopher protocol itself is very simple so getting a simple server up and running was rather easy: gopher://gopher.conman.org/
dang 10y ago
This was posted yesterday but looks so good, and spent so little time on the front page, that we've put it into the second-chance pool (described at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380 and the links back from there). We wouldn't normally do that for a day-old post with 28 comments, but I think the HN software penalized this submission by mistake, which was bad. Plus also, it's the gopher protocol.
- sytse 10y ago
  Good call, I would have otherwise missed this awesome article.
andrewstuart 10y ago
You know how Paul Graham says "build something people want". Well somehow I headed in exactly the opposite direction and designed some strange nondescript beast that mashed up linked data (remember that concept, no? doesn't matter you missed nothing), with JavaScript and the web into some sort of Gopher-ish linked data browser. Basically with 15 lines of JavaScript you could navigate any http based open data API I named it NeoGopher (New Gopher) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yuSDU0JiI2c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yuSDU0JiI2c The madness starts at 1:30 (turn the sound down, the words serve only to confuse) Essentially it let you browse through linked lists. Each list item could link on to another list or to a web page. Each list was created by about 15 lines of JavaScript which could be loaded from any web server and the data came from any HTTP web API. Ahhh... so many meaningless words in the demo. Even I, who designed it, found it hard to explain what it was - today I would say "It's a linked list browser.", which is what Gopher was. Of all the stupid ideas I have had (there have been many), re-inventing Gopher was probably the worst. What was I thinking? btw this is an edited repost of a comment I made a while back on the Gopher topic.
- vmorgulis 10y ago
  Very interesting ideas. It reminds me Xanadu (without the entanglement): http://xanadu.com/Ping'n'Jeff.png http://xanadu.com/Ping'n'Jeff.png My idea for Gopher is to convert webpages on the fly with a text browser like elinks.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
aswanson 10y ago
The most popular protocol, or method of retrieving information from another computer, was FTP (file transfer protocol), the primitive, labor-intensive equivalent of knocking on someone’s door and asking if you could carry away his piano. lol, I wonder what the computing equivalent of ftp today is.
- digi_owl 10y ago
  Still FTP.
  - regularfry 10y ago
    Sftp, hopefully.
    - wtbob 10y ago
      > Sftp, hopefully. Ha! I've had precisely one vendor ask for an SSH public key to set up file transfer. The world runs on FTP. It's sad. Even sadder, it's often a Windows FTP server!
      - digi_owl 10y ago
        If there was a sane way to set up an anonymous sftp server, never mind having web browsers actually understand sftp links, things may change.
dasil003 10y ago
When I got my first shell account in 1993 it was as a student of the University of Minnesota, and I remember that the first time you logged in it didn't dump you directly into tcsh or whatever, there was an easy shell that let you navigate by number. I recall vividly that both Gopher and the World Wide Web were on this list (previously I only had had experience with Usenet and FTP). Initially it seemed like Gopher had all the things, and the WWW was some weird novelty. Of course within a year I had seen Mosaic running, and building web pages became a career long obsession for me. It's hard for me to gauge the politics (I only turned 15 in 1993), but at least from where I sat, the multimedia document with embedded hyperlinks was the secret sauce. It was the same thing that had gotten me obsessed with HyperCard back in the day. The web just felt like this creative playground with unlimited untapped potential, and Gopher felt sort of bureaucratic (again, maybe just from where I sat at the U of M). Ironic that now Gopher is maintained as a labor of love by hobbyists.
angry_octet 10y ago
I remember discovering gopher through the wonderful TurboGopher program. All the fiddling around with FTP was revealed to be pointless and dumb. For a brief period, really until Altavista came along to make Mosaic useful, Gopher was so cool. But at school we all had our public_html directory being published to the world, and you could nag the sysadmin to install cgibins, whereas gopher was an institutional thing and focused on files. Tangent: NNTP is still better than any web forum, fb or twitter. Too bad solving the spam problem is only via centralised identity platforms.
pronoiac 10y ago
In February, Metafilter brought back their Gopher server, "after fifteen years of downtime:" https://metatalk.metafilter.com/24019/Direct-your-gopher-client-to-gopher-gophermetafiltercom https://metatalk.metafilter.com/24019/Direct-your-gopher-cli...
pronoiac 10y ago
A contemporary article about Hyper-G: http://much.iicm.edu/projects/hyper-g/9.htm/ http://much.iicm.edu/projects/hyper-g/9.htm/ My impression was that they tried to monetize Hyper-G immediately, with the negative results mentioned in the original article. Having an open source server may have helped avoid that for both; I think Apache was a powerful force for the web.

235 points by lindner 10y ago

Lots of photos and quotes from the original Gopher team on this long form article.

Interesting! I guess I knew the basic outlines of that story, having been an internet user in 1993... but it's a neat story. Good work, guys!

dmd 10y ago

> “I still remember a woman in pumps jumping up and down and shouting, ‘You can’t do that!’ ” > Among the team's offenses: Gopher didn’t use a mainframe computer and its server-client setup empowered anyone with a PC, not a central authority. File this under "straw-man responses that happened in their feverish anti-establishment imaginations."

falcolas 10y ago
Source? Context? Authority even?
lindner 10y ago
Not sure what dmd is implying here. But I will say that the committee was looking at using either X.500 or CSO protocols instead. Thus it would rely on a centralized authority and a publishing model that would not allow for individuals to run their own servers. Also remember that this was the old internet where we didn't have NAT or really any firewalling. Most of the University of Minnesota's class B was open to the world at the time. In fact I used to send email directly to my workstation instead of the central mail host to avoid delays..
x2398dh1 10y ago
Actually, the article very accurately describes exactly how the University of Minnesota works with surprisingly vivid realism. It's likely that the department was receiving significant funding from companies asking it to do mainframe research of some kind. Working on what were considered "toys," at the time probably would have looked extremely bad. Now does this mean that Gopher would have, "won out," over the WWW? No. But the description holds.

nemo44x 10y ago

Does anyone have a list of modern alternative (experimental even) protocols out there?

lindner 10y ago
The recent Decentralized Web Summit touched on a number of alternates: http://www.decentralizedweb.net/ http://www.decentralizedweb.net/ Interplanetary File System (IPFS) was discussed quite a bit. NameCoin was the most popular DNS replacement. ZeroNet was a really interesting project that does all of the above. http://ipfs.io/ http://ipfs.io/ http://namecoin.info/ http://namecoin.info/ http://zeronet.io/ http://zeronet.io/
- nickpsecurity 10y ago
  I also collect old models, centralized or not, in case they're useful in modern situations (esp intranet) for reliability or security especially. What do you think of Tannenbaum et al's Globe model as WWW alternative? https://cds.cern.ch/record/400321/files/p117.pdf https://cds.cern.ch/record/400321/files/p117.pdf I thought it was an interesting design that provided nice way of reducing abstraction gaps and rework in the various layers/techs. They integrated it with their Amoeba OS that ran on cluster of workstations w/ single, system image.
  - lindner 10y ago
    Wasn't familiar with this so I skimmed the IEEE paper: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/articleDetails.jsp?arnumber=749137 http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/articleDetails.jsp?arnumber=7... Interesting that it references the Legion OS work that Greg Lindahl spoke about at the Summit: http://legion.virginia.edu/ http://legion.virginia.edu/ At first glance Globe feels like a low-level solution for the problem. Mapping objects to binaries via a broker and all that. The web we have today solved much of the issues in other ways. Anycast DNS and CDNs allow for content distribution. Storing state in cookies allows for Operational transform and other eventually consistent techniques. Thanks for the reference and connecting a few dots!
10y ago

protomyth 10y ago

"Eventually, though, the U did want some money — for itself. At GopherCon ’93, Yen announced that for-profit Gopher users would need to pay the U a licensing fee: hundreds or thousands of dollars, depending on the size and nature of their business." I wonder how many futures have been destroyed from the desire to profit off the eating of the seeds instead of fruit?

lindner 10y ago
In hindsight it was a stupid limiting move. Yes, we did get the Gopher T-shirt on MTV and a number of companies did end up paying. I was even loaned out for a few weeks to Schlumberger to assist with putting Gopher servers on Oil Platforms. But it was optimizing for a local maxima. The damage was done, the community was broken.
joezydeco 10y ago
I'm sure UIUC could chime in on that w/Mosaic.
- sevensor 10y ago
  Incidentally, when I matriculated at UIUC in 1997, most of the computer-lab Macs ran NCSA Mosaic. (The PCs and UNIX machines had Netscape.) I remember receiving some materials on internet resources when I got to the dorms. At the time, many freshmen required instructions on how to use the internet. These materials had been prepared a few years earlier and still included references to Gopher.
x2398dh1 10y ago
The University of Minnesota office of commercialization of technology does this habitually, asking for far too much money from startup entrepreneurs. Many of the academians have no idea how business works, and don't care. 90% of their success has come from one patent. So from the standpoint of this one institution, you could actually answer that question by auditing their performance over the past. On the other hand, it is a publicly funded institution, funded by taxes and student fees. So one has to also ask if it would be fair for a small few having little to do with the University should be able to profit off of investments made by public dollars and overly high student debt.

wolfgangh 10y ago

I miss Gopher. I remember when the Gopher sites started to display: "This service has been discontinued. Please use WWW instead". I was completely disappointed.

x2398dh1 10y ago
Actually there are still a number of Gopher servers in operation, and you can use Firefox to visit them.
- vmorgulis 10y ago
  "All the gopher servers (that we know of)" http://gopher.floodgap.com/gopher/gw?gopher://gopher.floodgap.com:70/1/world http://gopher.floodgap.com/gopher/gw?gopher://gopher.floodga... SDF still provides a gopherspace inside its free shell: http://sdf.org/?tutorials/gopher http://sdf.org/?tutorials/gopher

zeveb 10y ago

> To the curious who stayed behind, Berners-Lee explained that the Web could be used to connect all the information on the internet through hyperlinks. You could click on a word or a phrase in a document and immediately retrieve a related document, click again on a phrase in that document, and so on. It acted like a web laid over the internet, so you could spider from one source of information to another on nearly invisible threads. One of the saddest things about the modern Internet is how little hypertext is used. As an example, I would have expected, 'Mark McCahill' to link to his personal or academic site[0], 'San Diego' to link to the city government's site[1], 'Hyatt Islandia' to link to that hotel's site [2] (perhaps with a note that its name has changed), and 'Mission Bay' to link to an appropriate page [3] — and that's in the first paragraph alone. It's also interesting how those slides from 1992 look current as of 2016: flat, bullet-pointed, sans-serif font. > But 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. It was “as though all of TV was PBS,” Lindner says. “No commercials.” Those really were the days. I remember the Canter & Siegel spam, and how appalled we all were to see it. The Internet then was more genteel. Honestly, I wish it were still non-commercial: available to be used by companies (as it was even in the 90s), but not as an advertising medium. > At GopherCon ’93, Yen announced that for-profit Gopher users would need to pay the U a licensing fee: hundreds or thousands of dollars, depending on the size and nature of their business. Many users felt betrayed. In the open-source computing spirit of the day, they had contributed code to Gopher, helping the team keep up with the times. Now they were being asked to pony up. As much as it's become fashionable to group-hate esr the last decade or so, I think that it's important to recognise his major contribution: persuading folks the free software (under a different name) can be good for business. Imagine if the university had kept Gopher as GPLed software, rather than demanding money from its users. > At its peak, the Mother Gopher consisted of 10 Apple IIci computers. But when it was finally euthanized, who knows what shape it was in. There was no ceremony. Nothing was carted off to a museum. Gopherspace simply became emptier, and the world without the Web became harder to imagine. That's definitely sad. We need to do a better job of honouring our history and marking important events. Even in the late 90s or early 2000s, folks ought to have recognised the historic import of gopher. [0] https://fds.duke.edu/db/aas/ISIS/faculty/mark.mccahill https://fds.duke.edu/db/aas/ISIS/faculty/mark.mccahill [1] https://www.sandiego.gov/ https://www.sandiego.gov/ [2] http://missionbay.regency.hyatt.com/en/hotel/home.html http://missionbay.regency.hyatt.com/en/hotel/home.html [3] https://www.sandiego.gov/park-and-recreation/parks/regional/missionbay https://www.sandiego.gov/park-and-recreation/parks/regional/...

vmorgulis 10y ago

Gopher is still alive :) http://gopher.floodgap.com/gopher/gw http://gopher.floodgap.com/gopher/gw Veronica-2 is the gopherspace search engine: http://gopher.floodgap.com/gopher/gw?ss=gopher%3A%2F%2Fgopher.floodgap.com%3A70%2F7%2Fv2%2Fvs&sq=McCahill http://gopher.floodgap.com/gopher/gw?ss=gopher%3A%2F%2Fgophe...

Jaruzel 10y ago
Inspired by Cameron Kaiser's (and others) ongoing work to keep Gopher alive, I spent a good few months this year writing a new Windows client for it: http://www.weegeeks.com/upload/Jar-Gopher-Browser-Full-Screenshots.jpg http://www.weegeeks.com/upload/Jar-Gopher-Browser-Full-Scree... Unfortunately real life has got in the way, and I've not found time to release it yet.
- zafiro17 10y ago
  Not sure how you'd visit gopher sites in Windows. Add the Overbite Firefox plugin available at Floodgap, I suppose. On Unix/Linux "forg" is really nice on the GUI side, and lynx is your best bet at the CLI. Although you'll find the original gopher client in a lot of repos too - all derivatives of Debian/Ubuntu and FreeBSD, at least.
  - Jaruzel 10y ago
    > Not sure how you'd visit gopher sites in Windows. By using a windows Gopher client. There are several, but mostly outdated. Which is why I have written a new one. I guess you didn't check the screenshot I posted.
spc476 10y ago
And there are even blogs (known as phlogs) in gopher. After reading one (gopher://sdf.org/1/users/jstg/phlog) I was motivated enough to modify my blogging engine (https://github.com/spc476/mod_blog https://github.com/spc476/mod_blog) to support gopher. The gopher protocol itself is very simple so getting a simple server up and running was rather easy: gopher://gopher.conman.org/

dang 10y ago

This was posted yesterday but looks so good, and spent so little time on the front page, that we've put it into the second-chance pool (described at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380 and the links back from there). We wouldn't normally do that for a day-old post with 28 comments, but I think the HN software penalized this submission by mistake, which was bad. Plus also, it's the gopher protocol.

sytse 10y ago
Good call, I would have otherwise missed this awesome article.

andrewstuart 10y ago

You know how Paul Graham says "build something people want". Well somehow I headed in exactly the opposite direction and designed some strange nondescript beast that mashed up linked data (remember that concept, no? doesn't matter you missed nothing), with JavaScript and the web into some sort of Gopher-ish linked data browser. Basically with 15 lines of JavaScript you could navigate any http based open data API I named it NeoGopher (New Gopher) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yuSDU0JiI2c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yuSDU0JiI2c The madness starts at 1:30 (turn the sound down, the words serve only to confuse) Essentially it let you browse through linked lists. Each list item could link on to another list or to a web page. Each list was created by about 15 lines of JavaScript which could be loaded from any web server and the data came from any HTTP web API. Ahhh... so many meaningless words in the demo. Even I, who designed it, found it hard to explain what it was - today I would say "It's a linked list browser.", which is what Gopher was. Of all the stupid ideas I have had (there have been many), re-inventing Gopher was probably the worst. What was I thinking? btw this is an edited repost of a comment I made a while back on the Gopher topic.

vmorgulis 10y ago
Very interesting ideas. It reminds me Xanadu (without the entanglement): http://xanadu.com/Ping'n'Jeff.png http://xanadu.com/Ping'n'Jeff.png My idea for Gopher is to convert webpages on the fly with a text browser like elinks.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

aswanson 10y ago

The most popular protocol, or method of retrieving information from another computer, was FTP (file transfer protocol), the primitive, labor-intensive equivalent of knocking on someone’s door and asking if you could carry away his piano. lol, I wonder what the computing equivalent of ftp today is.

digi_owl 10y ago
Still FTP.
- regularfry 10y ago
  Sftp, hopefully.
  - wtbob 10y ago
    > Sftp, hopefully. Ha! I've had precisely one vendor ask for an SSH public key to set up file transfer. The world runs on FTP. It's sad. Even sadder, it's often a Windows FTP server!
    - digi_owl 10y ago
      If there was a sane way to set up an anonymous sftp server, never mind having web browsers actually understand sftp links, things may change.

dasil003 10y ago

When I got my first shell account in 1993 it was as a student of the University of Minnesota, and I remember that the first time you logged in it didn't dump you directly into tcsh or whatever, there was an easy shell that let you navigate by number. I recall vividly that both Gopher and the World Wide Web were on this list (previously I only had had experience with Usenet and FTP). Initially it seemed like Gopher had all the things, and the WWW was some weird novelty. Of course within a year I had seen Mosaic running, and building web pages became a career long obsession for me. It's hard for me to gauge the politics (I only turned 15 in 1993), but at least from where I sat, the multimedia document with embedded hyperlinks was the secret sauce. It was the same thing that had gotten me obsessed with HyperCard back in the day. The web just felt like this creative playground with unlimited untapped potential, and Gopher felt sort of bureaucratic (again, maybe just from where I sat at the U of M). Ironic that now Gopher is maintained as a labor of love by hobbyists.

angry_octet 10y ago

I remember discovering gopher through the wonderful TurboGopher program. All the fiddling around with FTP was revealed to be pointless and dumb. For a brief period, really until Altavista came along to make Mosaic useful, Gopher was so cool. But at school we all had our public_html directory being published to the world, and you could nag the sysadmin to install cgibins, whereas gopher was an institutional thing and focused on files. Tangent: NNTP is still better than any web forum, fb or twitter. Too bad solving the spam problem is only via centralised identity platforms.

pronoiac 10y ago

In February, Metafilter brought back their Gopher server, "after fifteen years of downtime:" https://metatalk.metafilter.com/24019/Direct-your-gopher-client-to-gopher-gophermetafiltercom https://metatalk.metafilter.com/24019/Direct-your-gopher-cli...

pronoiac 10y ago

A contemporary article about Hyper-G: http://much.iicm.edu/projects/hyper-g/9.htm/ http://much.iicm.edu/projects/hyper-g/9.htm/ My impression was that they tried to monetize Hyper-G immediately, with the negative results mentioned in the original article. Having an open source server may have helped avoid that for both; I think Apache was a powerful force for the web.