[COFF] On the rise and fall of Gopher

[Jason Stevens]

Back when the ‘answer’ was being handed to us via NeXTSTEP.  Full text indexing of all the resources!

Kind of funny how Digital and NeXT among others missed that boat.

I’ve hacked Altavista desktop search to be publicially available, but I’ve never managed to build a NeXT public search tool thing via gopher.  Speaking of, I do host a gopher site, and I do get a fair bit of traffic, although I think it’s mostly crawlers, and people looking for exploits/warez – I’d imagine people running public FTP servers see the same kind of nonsense.

gopher2_3.1 builds somewhat easily on 64bit Linux, and even works! … Although I’m not sure that anyone else needs to or really wants to join the gopherspace.



From: Michael Kjörling
Sent: Saturday, February 22, 2020 5:33 PM
To: coff at minnie.tuhs.org
Subject: [COFF] On the rise and fall of Gopher

The EFF just published an article on the rise and fall of Gopher on
their Deeplinks blog.

"Gopher: When Adversarial Interoperability Burrowed Under the
Gatekeepers' Fortresses"

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/02/gopher-when-adversarial-interoperability-burrowed-under-gatekeepers-fortresses

I thought it might be of interest to people here.

-- 
Michael Kjörling • https://michael.kjorling.se • michael at kjorling.se
“Remember when, on the Internet, nobody cared that you were a dog?”

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