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I first came across the gopher protocol in the fall of 1999, about 3 or 4 years after first stumbling about the internet (courtesy of my high school), and well after the gopher protocol had faded from the public's mind. But for some particular reason, I was favourably disposed towards the protocol, more so than I was to http.
Gopherspace was what I imagined the internet, prior to commercialisation, was like: a vast sea of text documents, some pictures, perhaps a video, or sound clip, or two, and nary an advertisement in sight (excluding those websites maintained by corporations, which may or may not qualify as ads). There was something elegant about the stark simplicity of gopherspace, and that elegance appealed to my spartan nature.
And so it remains, almost ten years later, that gopherspace still holds the same appeal for me today, as it did when I first came across it. Granted I have yet to setup my own gopher server (a long-standing, but unfulfilled, goal), so until then, this page will have to serve as my small contribution to the promotion of the gopher protocol.
Ave Goopher://!
The gopher protocol began its life at the University of Minnesota way back in 1991. Developers there were looking for a way of efficiently sharing documents amongst academics and researchers using a consistent interface, and lo-and-behold they came up with gopher.
Gopher is a network protocol that organises files in hierarchical, text-based lists, and uses the following item-types (which include the original item-types, the gopher+ item-types, and common but unofficial item-types) to identify different files and items that appear in the hierarchy:
For the next few years, gopher was THE protocol of the internet, and gopher servers began to spring up all over the place. By 1995, you couldn't swing a dead cat on the internet without hitting a gopher server. Unfortunately for gopher, 1995 also marked the year that http began to overtake it due to the ability to integrate text, images, audio, and video, into one page, and the lack of a strict hierarchical file organisation structure.
But even http's technical advantages need not have spelled quite the doom that gopher has since suffered. Unfortunately (again) for gopher, the University of Minnesota began charging a licencing fee for gopher servers. Thus http's rapid rise to dominance was assured.
Fortunately, the University of Minnesota eventually had a change of heart, releasing gopher under the GPL in 2000, and while wide adoption of gopher is likely not going to happen (the University of Minnesota has even shut down their gopher server), there are still dedicated hobbyists and enthusiasts out there, tending the remaining gopher servers, helping to keep an important part of electronic history alive.
I have seen three theories as to the origin of the gopher name. Any one, or combination of, which might be true.
So first the good news: gopher can be accessed using your generic, everyday, web browser. Now the bad news: not all browsers can access the protocol.
It seems that starting in Mozilla 2 (the core of Firefox) support for gopher will be removed completely. The original intention was to remove gopher support from Firefox 3, but as the code made it past the beta 1 release, there seems some reluctance to remove it at this point. As to what effect the removal of support from the Mozilla 2 core means for Camino and Seamonkey, I am uncertain. Hopefully these projects will pursue a different path.
For more detailed information on the removal, read the following bugzilla reports:
And for those that might be curious, here's a copy of the (very) short discussion I had with (someone who may, or may not, have been) Asa Dotzler, Mozilla's head of QA, on the subject of removing gopher support from Firefox.
There is now a plugin available for Firefox that provides greater gopher support than was included in the browser to begin with (I guess someone didn't wait for the writing on the wall to dry), and its name is Overbite.
HKEY_CURRENT\
Software\
Microsoft\
Windows\
CurrentVersion\
InternetSettings\
EnableGopher = dword:00000001If you are using one of the three browsers listed above, you'll need to use a gopher-to-http gateway such as:
Much like http, gopher sites can be searched courtesy of Veronica-2/VISHNU. The service provided is much more rudimentary than that found on a traditional http search engine, but it gets the job done. Veronica-2 searches gopher and returns results for folders and files with the desired query in the selectors and menus, while VISHNU regroups the results in a tree format, grouping the results in virtual folders according to which server they were found on.
Search using:
These are some of the larger servers I've found in gopherspace. Of them, floodgap and sdf are probably the largest.
And if you want a more complete list of the current gopher servers that are up, running, and accessible, the following links will provide just that.
I accumulated most of these trying to find a definitive guide to the item-types that gopher+ added to the protocol (something I have been partially successful in). The list starts with RFC documents, moves into man pages for gopher, and a couple associated programmes, and concludes with those texts that do not fall into either category.