4 ms·

Use that. Anyone remember gopher? And the two links protocol, with backlinks.

DougN7 8y ago
I remember seeing Mosaic and thinking “meh, not much more than gopher”. I sure didn’t have the vision of where all that would lead!
jgalt212 8y ago
Yes, gopher was pretty amazing and if it had won, given its well organized nature, there would have been much less need for a google to add some order to the tangled mesh of the web than the tree of the gopher-verse.
- amyjess 8y ago
  Gopher still had Veronica and WAIS, though. No matter what you build, you're eventually going to need some kind of search engine for it.
jbuzbee 8y ago
Oh yeah. I ran gopher. But once I Installed Mosaic I never looked back. I knew the http web would be big but I vastly underestimated how big. Hindsight and all that...
chrissnell 8y ago
Yes, I do. I loved Gopher. When I was a senior in high school in 1992, a buddy and me discovered Gopher. We were a really unlikely pair of nerds: I was into skateboarding and my buddy was a starting lineman on the HS football team. For the post-internet generation here, you have to understand just how unusual and uncool it was to be into computers in the early 90s. Even the nerds at my school weren't into BBSes or the early Internet but we were, in a closeted sort of way. So, every day at lunchtime, we would go home to our respective houses and get on a BBS and chat with each other just because the technology was so cool. One day, we were on a local Waffle BBS (I think it ran on BSD-OS or something like that) and we read about a dialup at the local university that could be used to get a gopher client. You would dial into their terminal server and this gave you unauthenticated telnet access anywhere. From there, we would telnet to liberty.wlu.edu, some kind of *nix server (probably Sun) that had a no-auth-required login that would get you a Gopher client. From there, we would browse the Gopher-web, which was pretty amazing for 1992. We'd visit gopher servers in Sweden, Japan, Germany, everywhere. We believed that when we went from the WLU gopher (in Virginia) to a Gopher server in Sweden, that a modem was dialing between those two locations and so on. We were really worried that we'd get in huge trouble for racking up tens of thousands of dollars in long distance. Yeah, I loved gopher. :)
- stevekemp 8y ago
  I remember explaining to my parents what email was, and at one point one of them asked if it cost more money to send an email to a recipient that was further away. That's a similar level of cuteness.
- rconti 8y ago
  I remember how impressed with myself I was when I learned to simply follow the instructions that said "press ^] to escape" when using the King County Library System's telnet menu system. That is to say, the library computer system presented you a menu with a very small number of telnet destination options you chose by number. But if you chose one, and hit the escape sequence, it would gasp escape, and then you just had to know the 'open' command to telnet ANYWHERE IN THE WORLD. You could also access the library system remotely, but I can't remember how or why this mattered -- maybe it was from another menu system that didn't allow escapes, or maybe there was a dialup option, or... something. In any event, you could hop from one place, into KCLS, use the menu to telnet, break out of the connection, and open a connection to another place. It was like magic.
einr 8y ago
Gopher is still a thing in certain parts of the enthusiast scene. Notably, https://gopher.floodgap.com/ https://gopher.floodgap.com/ has been running since 1999 and is still going. It's accessible through a HTTP(S) gateway nowadays too since all common browsers have dropped native Gopher support. The server also hosts the directory of known currently active Gopher servers: https://gopher.floodgap.com/gopher/gw?gopher.floodgap.com/1/world https://gopher.floodgap.com/gopher/gw?gopher.floodgap.com/1/... ...and of course there is the Hacker News mirror for those net users who don't have HTTP/WorldWideWeb access: https://gopher.floodgap.com/gopher/gw?gopher://hngopher.com:70/1 https://gopher.floodgap.com/gopher/gw?gopher://hngopher.com:... I have a fanless thin client acting as server as home that runs a little Gopher server just for fun. It's very easy to set up and play with and there are several daemons for it that run on modern operating systems and are available in most package repositories.
- Jaruzel 8y ago
  Seems an opportunity to plug my Gopher client :) http://www.jaruzel.com/gopher/gopher-client-browser-for-windows http://www.jaruzel.com/gopher/gopher-client-browser-for-wind... There are over 400 gopher sites online currently. I crawled them recently, and drew a map: http://www.jaruzel.com/gopher/mapping-gopherspace http://www.jaruzel.com/gopher/mapping-gopherspace
  - einr 8y ago
    Hey, I actually have your Gopher client installed on my Windows machine. Great work!
    - Jaruzel 8y ago
      Cheers! Glad you like it!

I remember seeing Mosaic and thinking “meh, not much more than gopher”. I sure didn’t have the vision of where all that would lead!

jgalt212 8y ago

Yes, gopher was pretty amazing and if it had won, given its well organized nature, there would have been much less need for a google to add some order to the tangled mesh of the web than the tree of the gopher-verse.

amyjess 8y ago
Gopher still had Veronica and WAIS, though. No matter what you build, you're eventually going to need some kind of search engine for it.

jbuzbee 8y ago

Oh yeah. I ran gopher. But once I Installed Mosaic I never looked back. I knew the http web would be big but I vastly underestimated how big. Hindsight and all that...

chrissnell 8y ago

Yes, I do. I loved Gopher. When I was a senior in high school in 1992, a buddy and me discovered Gopher. We were a really unlikely pair of nerds: I was into skateboarding and my buddy was a starting lineman on the HS football team. For the post-internet generation here, you have to understand just how unusual and uncool it was to be into computers in the early 90s. Even the nerds at my school weren't into BBSes or the early Internet but we were, in a closeted sort of way. So, every day at lunchtime, we would go home to our respective houses and get on a BBS and chat with each other just because the technology was so cool. One day, we were on a local Waffle BBS (I think it ran on BSD-OS or something like that) and we read about a dialup at the local university that could be used to get a gopher client. You would dial into their terminal server and this gave you unauthenticated telnet access anywhere. From there, we would telnet to liberty.wlu.edu, some kind of *nix server (probably Sun) that had a no-auth-required login that would get you a Gopher client. From there, we would browse the Gopher-web, which was pretty amazing for 1992. We'd visit gopher servers in Sweden, Japan, Germany, everywhere. We believed that when we went from the WLU gopher (in Virginia) to a Gopher server in Sweden, that a modem was dialing between those two locations and so on. We were really worried that we'd get in huge trouble for racking up tens of thousands of dollars in long distance. Yeah, I loved gopher. :)

stevekemp 8y ago
I remember explaining to my parents what email was, and at one point one of them asked if it cost more money to send an email to a recipient that was further away. That's a similar level of cuteness.
rconti 8y ago
I remember how impressed with myself I was when I learned to simply follow the instructions that said "press ^] to escape" when using the King County Library System's telnet menu system. That is to say, the library computer system presented you a menu with a very small number of telnet destination options you chose by number. But if you chose one, and hit the escape sequence, it would gasp escape, and then you just had to know the 'open' command to telnet ANYWHERE IN THE WORLD. You could also access the library system remotely, but I can't remember how or why this mattered -- maybe it was from another menu system that didn't allow escapes, or maybe there was a dialup option, or... something. In any event, you could hop from one place, into KCLS, use the menu to telnet, break out of the connection, and open a connection to another place. It was like magic.

einr 8y ago

Gopher is still a thing in certain parts of the enthusiast scene. Notably, https://gopher.floodgap.com/ https://gopher.floodgap.com/ has been running since 1999 and is still going. It's accessible through a HTTP(S) gateway nowadays too since all common browsers have dropped native Gopher support. The server also hosts the directory of known currently active Gopher servers: https://gopher.floodgap.com/gopher/gw?gopher.floodgap.com/1/world https://gopher.floodgap.com/gopher/gw?gopher.floodgap.com/1/... ...and of course there is the Hacker News mirror for those net users who don't have HTTP/WorldWideWeb access: https://gopher.floodgap.com/gopher/gw?gopher://hngopher.com:70/1 https://gopher.floodgap.com/gopher/gw?gopher://hngopher.com:... I have a fanless thin client acting as server as home that runs a little Gopher server just for fun. It's very easy to set up and play with and there are several daemons for it that run on modern operating systems and are available in most package repositories.

Jaruzel 8y ago
Seems an opportunity to plug my Gopher client :) http://www.jaruzel.com/gopher/gopher-client-browser-for-windows http://www.jaruzel.com/gopher/gopher-client-browser-for-wind... There are over 400 gopher sites online currently. I crawled them recently, and drew a map: http://www.jaruzel.com/gopher/mapping-gopherspace http://www.jaruzel.com/gopher/mapping-gopherspace
- einr 8y ago
  Hey, I actually have your Gopher client installed on my Windows machine. Great work!
  - Jaruzel 8y ago
    Cheers! Glad you like it!