If you spend any amount of time using the Internet as we know it today, chances are you have suffered some inconvenience from the variety of interpretations of the various “standards” used to create the web. Every web browser renders web pages slightly differently; some Flash content isn’t compatible with older versions of Flash (and some versions of Flash aren’t supported on some operating systems at all!), etc. If you make your living creating web content, all of those problems may be amplified several times. Doesn’t it make you long for a real standard, where content is king, and presentation of said content is the same, regardless of whether you’re shopping for shoes or looking for an academic journal? The Gopher protocol, created in the early 1990s, had all that, and it ain’t dead yet!
Ars Technica has a nice retrospective of the Gopher protocol. It’s a no-nonsense information presentation mechanism that places content squarely at the forefront. No pictures-of-text or confusing and inconsistent navigation elements to slow you down: navigating one Gopher site is the same as navigating any other Gopher site.
Firefox provides native support for the Gopher protocol, and the Overbite project provides an enhanced add-on for Firefox, as well as an Adobe AIR standalone Gopher client. Old protocols die hard, I guess. There’s even a Twitter-over-Gopher solution (although everyone knows that Twitter-over-IRC earns more geek points).
I used Gopher at my university’s library, where the entire card catalog was indexed in a Gopher space. It was, at the time, remarkably obtuse and hard to use; but then again I was still fighting SLIP connections on my home dial-up to access the “Internet”. Everything was a little kludgey back then.
Given Gopher’s limited resurgence in popularity, what kind of Gopher site would you create today?
I have never stopped being a fan of Gopher. A lot of times, I don’t need the “pretty pictures”…I want speed and performance, and information. It allows those that don’t have access to high performance hardware to get the job done!
How can I not love a protocol which has search engines called Veronica and Jughead!
oh my … me too on the SLIP connections. Wow what a pita.
my gopher site would be just like all sites I manage, which are well structured html and look great and work well in lynx.
I’ve never used Gopher, but a protocols that encourages ASCII graphics doesn’t seem like the best example of content > presentation.
We’ve just launched the first early beta of NeoGopher.
Imagine NeoGopher as Gopher re-invented for the 21st century. NeoGopher (”new gopher”) is what Gopher might have been if instead of fading away in 1993, it had improved, extended, developed, added features and become more closely integrated with the world wide web. NeoGopher is dramatically more powerful than Gopher ever was.
You are welcome to download the beta at http://www.neogopher.com we’d love your feedback.
WWW: images > ascii art
Right; where the bulk of images on the WWW today are actually pictures of words. That’s progress, indeed!
We’re proud to have one of the original creators of Gopher, Paul Lindner, on our engineering team at LinkedIn.
Gopher was my first introduction to the internet — I used it long before I had an email address or discovered Mosaic and the world wide web.
Glad to see all the fond remembrance of Gopher past.
a facebook UI
hit 1 to view comments (there are 4)
hit 2 to download jpeg file linked to this status update
hit 3 to read next livefeed entry (45 of 209451)
hit 4 to read inbox (4 new messages)
hit 5 to log out
that’s perfect :P
Gopher + Perl = You’re Brain Just Got Smarter
- remove ‘You Are” contraction
- insert proper second person possessive
YOUR brain just got smarter
NeoGopher – Please put up a statement about your copyright and license. A privacy statement that separately covers the site and the application is needed too.
Thanks…