"The Trouble With Gopher"
Interpersonal Computing and Technology
with Gopher," in the March/April 1994 issue of _Internet World_. I
think think this may help clarify and explain some of the discussion
about gopher and MOSAIC on the "MOSAICal" thread"
"Ever hear the expression 'Better late than never?' When
people say that to me, I have an anwser: 'who says?' I'm a believer in
doing things right. When it's time to help fix a half-done job, that
bothers me. So when I started to explore the convoluted and confusing
world of Goperspace, I got both excited and upset.
". . . Anybody can install and advertise a Gopher. And, you'll
discover, lots of geniuses and morons have. Can we blame the good
folks at Minnesota for that? For making gopher too easy to install
and use? For making it so simple to link the Gophers of the world
together? I don't think so. Think of the Gopher pioneers as true
research scientists. The results of the Minnesota Gopher team are
something that can be used or abused. Gopher is a tool. Using tools
like Gopher to build information systems takes practice. Right now,
there are a lot of amateurs running Gopher servers. That's a problem.
". . . Gopherspace isn't organized; it's assembled. Gopher is
a true client-server application. The software you run when you type
'gopher' (or click on the gopher icon, for you GUI folks) doesn't have
any data. It points at a server, one of hundreds, maybe thousands, on
the Internet. You may have to pick one out yourself, or your system
administrator may have selected one for you as a default."
I hope the thinking of gopher as an assemblage of information without
organization is useful in thinking about Gopher--compared to the
organization that a library, for instance, adds to the information in
its collection.
Regards,
Zane Berge