When was gopher created

Yet that worked more rapidly than people might think today, and in the heyday of Gopher, much time was spent choosing and organizing links in layouts that could be grasped at a glance.

Gopher became the text-handling, document-delivery system it was intended to be. A user could display a text document on her screen, save it to a file, print it out, or even e-mail a copy to another person on the Internet.

The World Wide Web added graphics to text, but lost the menus. It took a while for increased power in communication, storage and computation -- bandwidth a thousand times broader baud MODEM to fiber optics , arrays of disk drives each a thousand times larger under 1 GB to over 1 TB and cheap servers PC CPUs a thousand times faster -- to permit us to regularly crawl the Web and catalog it for search engines.

While Gopher's menu system seems quaint, we should remember the time between the decline in Gopher usage and the arrival of search engine ascendency.

Back then, early World Wide Web users looked eagerly for lists of links "my favorite links" pages , and users were anxious to bookmark good links that they might never find again.

Without structured menus, users had taken a step backwards, but, with less structure, something with more generality and much greater power emerged by the dawn of the 21st century: the World Wide Web.

The World Wide Web was in its infancy in , and Gopher services quickly became established. By the late s, Gopher had largely ceased expanding. Several factors contributed to Gopher's stagnation:. Gopher remains in active use by its enthusiasts -- like Adam Curry and Dave Winer , the inventors of podcasting -- and there have been attempts to revive the use of Gopher on modern platforms and mobile devices.

One such attempt is The Overbite Project , which hosts various browser extensions and modern clients. As of [update] , there are approximately gopher servers indexed by Veronica-2, [ 17 ] reflecting a slow growth from when there were fewer than , [ 18 ] although many are infrequently updated. Within these servers Veronica indexed approximately 2. Browsers that do not natively support Gopher can still access servers using one of the available Gopher to HTTP gateways.

Gopher support was disabled in Internet Explorer versions 5. Plugins are also available for Konqueror [ 30 ] and a proxy-based extension for Google Chrome. Some have suggested that the bandwidth-sparing simple interface of Gopher would be a good match for mobile phones and personal digital assistants PDAs , [ 32 ] but so far, mobile adaptations of HTML and XML and other simplified content have proven more popular.

The early s have seen a renewed interest in native Gopher clients for popular Smartphones. Overbite , an open source client for Android 1. Gopher was at its height of popularity during a time when there were still many equally competing computer architectures and operating systems. The majority of these clients are hard coded to work on TCP port Users of Web browsers that have incomplete or no support for Gopher can access content on Gopher servers via a server gateway or proxy server that converts Gopher menus into HTML ; known proxies are the Floodgap Public Gopher proxy, Gopher Proxy , and the WikkaGopher proxy.

The conceptualization of knowledge in "Gopher space" or a "cloud" as specific information in a particular file, and the prominence of the FTP, influenced the technology and the resulting functionality of Gopher. As part of its design goals, Gopher functions and appears much like a mountable read-only global network file system and software, such as gopherfs , is available that can actually mount a Gopher server as a FUSE resource. A Gopher system consists of a series of hierarchical hyperlinkable menus.

The choice of menu items and titles is controlled by the administrator of the server. Similar to a file on a Web server, a file on a Gopher server can be linked to as a menu item from any other Gopher server. Many servers take advantage of this inter-server linking to provide a directory of other servers that the user can access.

The Gopher protocol was first described in RFC The protocol is simple to negotiate, making it possible to browse without using a client. A standard gopher session may therefore appear as follows:.

Here, the client has established a TCP connection with the server on port 70, the standard gopher port. This is the selector, which identifies the document to be retrieved. If the item selector were an empty line, the default directory would be selected. The server then replies with the requested item and closes the connection.

According to the protocol, before the connection is closed, the server should send a full-stop i. However, as is the case here, not all servers conform to this part of the protocol and the server may close the connection without returning the final full-stop. In this example, the item sent back is a gopher menu, a directory consisting of a sequence of lines each of which describes an item that can be retrieved.

Most clients will display these as hypertext links, and so allow the user to navigate through gopherspace by following the links. The item type and display string are joined without a space; the other fields are separated by the tab character.

Because of the simplicity of the Gopher protocol, tools such as netcat make it possible to download Gopher content easily from the command line:. The protocol is also supported by cURL as of 7. Item types are described in gopher menus by a single number or case specific letter and act as hints to the client to tell it how to handle a specific media type in a menu, analogous to a MIME type.

Every client necessarily must understand itemtypes 0 and 1. All known clients understand item types 0 through 9 , g , and s , and all but the very oldest also understand file-types h and i. A list of additional file-type definitions has continued to evolve over time, with some clients supporting them and others not.

As such, many servers assign the generic 9 to every binary file, hoping that the client's computer will be able to correctly process the file.

John Goerzen created an addition [ 35 ] to the Gopher protocol, commonly referred to as " URL links", that allows links to any protocol that supports URLs. The master Gopherspace search engine is Veronica. Veronica offers a keyword search of all the public Internet Gopher server menu titles. A Veronica search produces a menu of Gopher items, each of which is a direct pointer to a Gopher data source.

Individual Gopher servers may also use localized search engines specific to their content such as Jughead and Jugtail. Because the protocol is trivial to implement in a basic fashion, there are many server packages still available, and some are still maintained. Thamrin FE Univ. Chat WhatsApp. The top level menu of a Gopher server. This architecture allowed users to browse up and down the hierarchy of files, looking for files that interested them.

Like all other Internet clients of the time, Gopher had a command line interface, using arrow keys and characters to represent functions. Many additional key commands were also available, but varied greatly from one client to another. Internet Gopher Information Client v1. The other protocols and tools mentioned above made important steps in this direction, by allowing organizations to share files between platforms and without regard to specific computer architectures, but they still required a familiarity with the directory structure and the tools generally FTP and Telnet used to negotiate it.

Gopher took transparency to a higher level, since visitors to a Gopher site did not need to know the specific file name or even the host and path name on the computer where a file was located in order to retrieve it.

One would simply type or click on a number to select the menu he or she wanted, and Gopher would take care of dealing with the details of computer architecture. Not only were the barriers to entry very low in terms of learning the system, but they were also quite low technologically.

Both the client and server software were compact and easy enough to install that a wide range of computer users could begin to use the Internet, who had previously found it too intimidating, time consuming, or expensive. An early text-based Web browser The adoption of the Web quickly became international.

In , the Gopher development community had a conference of its own, GopherCon' Many new ideas and implementations were presented and shared. A spider crawled around Gopher menus all over the world, collecting links and retrieving them for the index. It became so popular that it quickly became very difficult to connect to Veronica, despite a number of other sites being developed to ease the load. This tool was similar to Veronica, except that it indexed single sites, instead of all Gopherspace.

Peter Deutsch, who developed Archie, insisted its name was short for Archiver, and had nothing to do with the comic strip. 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. The sole outlier in the microcomputer mosh pit was Bob Alberti, a programmer who named a server Indigo, as in the Indigo Girls. Early on, it was used for NASA materials research. The microcomputer team, in addition to developing software for the U, ran a showroom for students and faculty interested in buying a Mac, taught computer training classes, tested software, and served as a help center for people with PC problems — walk-in and call-in.

Gopher, however, was claiming more and more of their time. The team, in hour sessions fueled by beer, pizza, and speed metal, finished writing Gopher in about three weeks. It became known as the Mother Gopher. While it did everything the U required and then some, to the committee it felt like a middle finger.

After the meeting, McCahill leaned on the director of the computer center, a Chinese-American man named Shih Pau Yen, who had supported Gopher all along. Yen ran interference, and the Gopher team kept working on it in their own time. Finally, in April , still unable to persuade the U to take on Gopher, Lindner released it into the wild. Within months, the team was hearing from Gopher users around the country.

The ban was lifted. Never numbering more than six core members, the team fanned out to conferences to spread the Gopher gospel, while continuing to improve and diversify the protocol. In the process they ended up laying the foundation for much of how we navigate the internet.

The first hyperlinks. The first bookmarks. Within a year, there were hundreds of Gopher servers. Gopher could do that. It was simple to use, it could network lots and lots of computers. It gave people a reason to say, hey, this internet is good. Al Gore, then a U.

The Gopher T-shirt, black and scribbly, listed the names of places with Gopher servers on the back, in the style of rock tour shirts. Some team members dreamed of fortune to go with their fame. 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.

Before coming to work in the Microcomputer Center, Alberti had helped create the first online multi-player role-playing game — called Scepter of Goth, an ancestor of World of Warcraft and the like.

Eventually, though, the U did want some money — for itself. 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.

The reaction deflated the team. Asking for a contribution seemed reasonable. This is a fact of life. In , Gopher was still far more popular than the World Wide Web, and Gopher traffic grew by percent. But the Web was starting to catch up — that year, it grew by , percent. McCahill told Berners-Lee that he would need to look at the Web more closely. There were no graphics yet. It was still only running on NeXT computers. Soon enough, the Web did have pictures and was available on more platforms.

In , the first popular Web browser, Mosaic, was introduced for sale, breaking the commercial taboo of the internet and suggesting — to McCahill at least — that tech investors had taken sides. In , modem speeds doubled, and the interminable rendering of images on the Web — once dubbed the World Wide Wait — greatly accelerated.

PCs began to be sold with these faster modems built in. He had fallen off the wave, and almost overnight was revealed as a buck-toothed square, ignored by the girls on the beach, his surfboard held together by duct tape. A has-been. I was invited to give a talk about Gopher at Princeton, and I had my slides all printed up on my little university-budget black-and-white foils.