He was supposedly disgusted when Veronica and Jughead appeared. Functionality such as bookmarking was improved, graphic user interfaces GUIs were released, and there was even a client called TurboGopherVR that allowed users to search gopher space through a 3-dimensional interface.
Setting up a Gopher server was seen by many as the easiest and most effective way to establish a niche on the Internet. By April of , the number of known Gopher servers had reached Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina posted the Unix version of Mosaic to NCSA's servers in the winter of "and it spread like a virus after that," 9 [Reid] with copies being downloaded per day by By June, it was in 21st place with.
It attracted more than Web enthusiasts, only of which could be admitted and was dubbed the "Woodstock of the Web. By some time around the middle of depending on whom you ask , WWW growth shot far ahead of Gopher growth. Within a few months after this split, Gopher traffic actually began to decrease. In addition to these trends in traffic, the number of links to the different types of servers also changed dramatically.
This had a recursive effect. As the Web became easier to use and more content-rich, traffic grew. As traffic grew, content providers had more incentive to invest in the Web. By early , Lycos had indexed 3. Gopher, on the other hand, has largely dropped out of the picture. The Usenet newsgroups dedicated to discussions about Gopher have very little traffic, with most recent messages either lamenting the loss of Gopher or lampooning it as a useless technology. A large proportion of Gopher servers have either been taken down or remain simply to point users to the Web.
Gopherspace is littered with messages like the following: The University of Houston Libraries Gopher is no longer being maintained. It is still maintained, but content is a bit lacking and the Veronica server is no longer operational.
Gopher, it would seem, is simply no longer a viable option for Internet development, use or information delivery. That Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt mostly killed off the Gopher protocol. University of Minnesota is now banned from submitting patches to the Linux Kernel, at least if submitted from a unm. Or fill in some of the dates between now and back then.
Minnesota is a boring place. People get up to mischief. Yep, a mischievous comment that I made earlier has been deleted.
I almost attended U of MN. The people there at the university were concerned that no one was actually looking at commits and that could be a vulnerability.
The bogus patches they submitted were intentionally bad to see if they would be caught. Basically pen-testing the commit process. The process caught the bad patches.
IMHO the ban was an overreaction. I was frankly glad that someone was thinking through these possibilities and making sure they got the attention they should have. But the neckbeards got butthurt over it. And think about it — licensing software is now ubiquitous.
No, the situation with Gopher was more complex than that. But those issues never made it to the security office at the University of Minnesota, so the damage was done before it could be forestalled or even well addressed by those who would have been, and eventually were, appalled by the whole situation. The University is doing its best to take the lessons learned by the situation to improve its processes so that similar situations are less likely to occur.
Not as a practical thing but just for fun I would love to see a gopher interface added to Hackaday. If not the main site perhaps it would just serve the retro. That would make it all worth it right there! Just a little script to parse a request string, run a db query and return the content. Well, starting to keep retro. I never understood why HaD did do so. I have been running Gopher server for some time now which mirrors my blog and some other sites directly from the database.
All with a few lines of PHP and no maintenance. Sure, if you open up the dev tools and look at the network inspector. Though you might be surprised to find that a visit to hackaday. There is a TLS 1. The night I met the woman who I eventually married, I mentioned this offhand, and she instantly knew what it was, since she grew up in Minnesota in the 90s.
All that said, the protocol is terrible. Binary file transfers are finished by simply closing the connection, rather than having a length header. It constantly tears down and rebuilds TCP connections, which is inefficient. To be clear, the oldest versions of HTTP had many of these same flaws, but it had the opportunity to fix most of them.
The Gopher revival people could do the same, but tend to treat bringing up these issues as an attack, rather than as a chance to fix things. My dad was in the gopher team the team that developed gopher, not one of the sports teams.
LOL, mostly because I could. Client-server protocols were a complete paradigm shift after for me about 15 years of writing mainframe code. But we were pioneers hacking our way through the brambly undergrowth, there were no conventions for such things yet.
McGill used a Gopher server into the s. For information, but it included a classified ad section. I bought a used computer to run Linux from someone advertising there in June More than one email admin cursed me for that when users got carried away with the number of newsgroups they tried to mirror. Obviously you only wanted to mirror a readable number of groups.
This was a long time ago, of course, it spooled the articles into a news spool that was read directly from the Unix filesystem by a newsreader such as TIN. No nntp used at all on the email only end of the connection. Years ago I contributed to the Gopher Manifesto and, when it appeared that was about to disappear, talked my brother into hosting it ad infinitum. Between his many internet side projects, he finds time to hang out with his wife Cat, who's funnier than he is.
Find me on: Twitter Like this? Well, you should read more of our stuff. Get more issues in your inbox. What is Tedium? Support us on Patreon Share your ideas! Disclosure: From time to time, we may use affiliate links in our content—but only when it makes sense. All rights reserved. Please, try the fish. Like what you're reading? About Archives Sponsor Us. Burrowing A Gopher Hole The Gopher protocol isn't supported by the modern web basically at all, but despite this, it lingers on, a quarter century from its peak.
Here's how. By Ernie Smith Jun 22, Tweet Share Subscribe. The design of the system was such that the server load was very modest. The university at first disowned the project, but public interest kept it alive.
Furthermore, Gopher represents the ability to bring an interconnected browsing experience to low-computing-power environments. Rather than the expense of large hosting power and bandwidth, Gopher uses an inexpensive protocol to serve and a trivial menuing format to parse, making it cost-effective for both client and server. Gopher sites can be hosted and downloaded effectively on bandwidth-constrained networks such as dialup and even low-speed wireless, and clients require little more than a TCP stack and minimal client software to navigate them.
In an environment where there are cries for "green computing" and "green data centres," along with large-scale media attention on emerging technology markets in developing nations and the proliferation of wireless technology with limited CPU and memory, it is hypocritical to this author why an established protocol such as Gopher would be bypassed for continued reliance on inefficient programming paradigms and expensive protocols.
Indeed, this sort of network doublethink has wrought large, unwieldy solutions such as WAP, a dramatic irony, since in the case of many low-power devices such as consumer mobile phones, the menu format used on them is nearly completely analogous to what Gopher already offered over a decade earlier.
More to the point, few in that market segment support the breadth of WAP, and those that can simply use a regular Web browser instead. Finally, if Web and gopher can coexist in the client's purview, they can also exist in the server's. This approach yields a natural and highly elegant consequence: if you don't want to choose strictly one way or the other to communicate to your users, choose neither and offer them both a structured low-bandwidth approach or a higher-bandwidth Web view, built from the same content.
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