The Internet Gopher from Minnesota

(abortretry.fail)

Comments

dwheeler 14 November 2024
> At GopherCon 1993, it was announced that Gopher servers would need to pay for the privilege of using the protocol... Well, that didn’t work out. People were angry and many felt betrayed. They weren’t quiet about any of it either.

> If one were to attempt to identify a single failure of Gopher in competition with the web, it would be the licensing costs. No such fee existed for the World Wide Web.

This, a thousand times. I watched as this happened. The instant that announcement was made, gopher was finished. Gopher might have lost later as HTML kept adding features, but by the time those features were added to HTML, gopher had already lost.

jandrese 14 November 2024
It seems to me that Gopher just failed to keep up with the times. Embedding images into the page was a killer feature for HTML and Gopher was still doggedly text based because they were still supporting the VT100 users that had been the core userbase. Plus the web went on to support text formatting, tables, and even eventually layout.

The article isn't entirely correct about the early web being completely free. Netscape was not free software, at least on paper. In practice they didn't try to stop people from spreading it far and wide and I think the sales were somewhat modest despite being the core element of a technological revolution. Also, I guess NCSA Mosiac was technically around, but it lacked enough features to make it a second class citizen compared to Netscape Navigator.

navanchauhan 15 November 2024
Shameless plug but I maintain a gopher client for iOS/macOS/visionOS: https://web.navan.dev/iGopherBrowser/
relistan 15 November 2024
Gopher was how I first got on the Internet in 1991. Cleveland FreeNet (like an Internet BBS) supported connecting to other FreeNets and Buffalo FreeNet had gopher. I searched lots of ftp sites, read lots. You also had 1.5MB of space you could use to download software to temporarily on Buffalo FreeNet. With gopher, two freenets, and zmodem, I downloaded and installed my first Linux system in 1992: 0.95a running on a 386sx16 with 4mb of memory and a 40mb HD. Gopher opened up the Internet when I was a kid in high school and the web wasn’t a thing. I’ll forever be grateful.
jhbadger 14 November 2024
Interesting that the article brings up the original 1990s GopherCons (which were conferences for discussing the Gopher protocol). I'm mildly annoyed that the Go programming community (which uses a gopher as a mascot) has reused the name for their conventions, but I guess it's been unused for a while.
rickcarlino 15 November 2024
If the idea of a text first structured hyper text protocol interests you, consider taking a look at the Gemini protocol, a modern equivalent. https://geminiprotocol.net/
snvzz 14 November 2024
Efficient too.

Even the original IBM PC can comfortably browse gopher sites with gopherus[0].

0. https://gopherus.sourceforge.net/

doublerabbit 15 November 2024
Betamax instead of VHS

8-Track instead of cassette

Minidiscs instead of CDs

Yahoo instead of Google

Gopher instead of HTTP

I want to believe that such alternative universe exists. How do I get there? I'm tired of this one...

jmclnx 14 November 2024
gopher is still active, see gopher://sdf.org, access via lynx
icedchai 15 November 2024
I first got involved with the Internet in the early 90's (summer of 1991, I think), right when Gopher was taking off, but before the WWW. Times were so much simpler.
lindner 15 November 2024
Confirmed! I was a big metalhead \m/ and was responsible for all the Unix-y things and spent a lot of time maintaining the community.

Other hostnames we had from bands and SciFi

huskerdu / nirvana / supernova / arcwelder

hafnhaf (big bonus points if you can figure this one out, lol!)

ashpool / tessier / joeboy / countzero

anthk 15 November 2024
gopher://gopher.com

gopher://magical.fish

As for the client, you can use Lynx under Unix/Linux and Lagrange under everything else.

a1o 14 November 2024
Cool seeing the Archie Comics references!
FerretFred 15 November 2024
Check out my gopher server using lynx gopher://gopher.petergarner.net ... Enjoy!
eichi 15 November 2024
I thought it was about Golang mascot.