2.11BSD terminal gopher client??

[Heinz-Bernd Eggenstein]

Hi all,

I'm running 2.11BSD , patchlevel 451 (so C compiler is still K&R, not ANSI C). I'm wondering if there is historic source code available for a small, text-only gopher client somewhere?

Alternatively, if someone has managed to get one of the "modern" minimalistic clients comnpiling and going (perhaps "cgo" which can be found on github) I might wait until I've patched my way up to an ANSI C compatible compiler and try that.

Cheers

HBE

[Johnny Billquist]

The C compiler in 2.11BSD isn't ANSI yet. Ragge did some work on cpp a
while ago to bring it up to ansi level of things, but the rest is still
to do, unless I remember wrong.

And no, I don't know of any gopher client.

Johnny

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[Heinz-Bernd Eggenstein]

Patches for 2.11BSD can be found here: https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Distributions/UCB/2.11BSD/Patches/  and the rather HUGE patch 460 provides the ansification of the C compiler. That patch breaks the Fortran compiler code, tho, and there is some bug in the ANSI prototype handling which is fixed in patch 465 so I guess if you want to have a working ANSI C compiler, you would want to patch your system all the way up to at least patchlevel 465. This involves some patches that require to rebuild the kernel as well. So to me it looks like all the necessary work has been done already, it's just that the 2.11 BSD that is provided as a ready-made disk image in the PiDP11 installation instructions isn't quite there yet in terms of the patchlevel.

Right?

HB

[Johnny Billquist]

I know where the patches are... After all, I'm managing one of the
official sites where the patches can be found...

Feel free to try and throw random ANSI C at the compiler. It might be
good enough at this stage, but it's not complete yet. Read through the
description of patch 460.

Speaking of which, would people want to get a new set of tapes that is
more up to date with regards to patches? I could create such a set, if
needed.

Johnny

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[Heinz-Bernd Eggenstein]

Sorry, didn't know about your role in this. Anyway I did read the descripton in p460 and limitations didn't seem so grave to me?

> Speaking of which, would people want to get a new set of tapes

I would be glad if discussion of  newer tapes could have their own thread since this one should stay on topic perhaps (gopher in 2.11BSD).

Cheers

HBE

[Johnny Billquist]

On 2021-08-01 15:27, 'Heinz-Bernd Eggenstein' via [PiDP-11] wrote:
> Sorry, didn't know about your role in this. Anyway I did read the
> descripton in p460 and limitations didn't seem so grave to me?

No worries. I don't mind being anonymous most of the time. I do do quite
a lot of 2.11BSD whacking around, though. But I do even more RSX stuff.

> > Speaking of which, would people want to get a new set of tapes
>
> I would be glad if discussion of  newer tapes could have their own
> thread since this one should stay on topic perhaps (gopher in 2.11BSD).

Fair enough.

Johnny

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[Stephen Casner]

Have you considered cross-compiling using gcc? That would work so
long as overlays are not required. (The binutils ld can produce 407,
410 and 411 object formats.) If overlays are required, it may be
possible to compile with gcc and then link on 2.11BSD, but I'm not
sure.

-- Steve

[Heinz-Bernd Eggenstein]

Thanks, I had not considered it but it seems like a very good fallback solution if a native compile cannot be done. THX

HBE

[amp...@gmail.com]

I was able to recall that UMN created gopher.  Google search results make me think UMN distributed the original gopher via ftp from boombox.micro.umn.edu, and that was certainly the place I downloaded a copy from back in the day.  Fortunately archive.org has some archived copies of at least /pub/gopher from there.  You can poke around in the various point-in-time snapshots you'll find at http://boombox.micro.umn.edu/pub/gopher/Unix/old-versions/ .  The very oldest UMN Unix gopher software listing I can find is gopher1.13.tar.Z which you can find listed at https://web.archive.org/web/20030508033822/http://boombox.micro.umn.edu/pub/gopher/Unix/old-versions/ .  But sadly only directory listings of /pub/gopher/Unix/old-versions were archived, not the files themselves.  But after finding that an old distribution name was gopher1.13.tar.Z, google quickly found me http://ftp.ulb.ac.be/pub/info_unix/gopher/ which DOES include that gopher distribution.  The gopher client in gopher1.13.tar.Z uses curses (which I think existed in 2.11BSD) and its Makefile has options to build on at least one version of BSD, but a quick look isn’t telling me if it ever built on 2.11BSD.  I remember building and using this or a version close to it on SunOS 4.x back before Solaris was introduced.  I am almost certain I would have built it with gcc, not cc.

 

-- Ron

 

[Heinz-Bernd Eggenstein]

Wow, excellent, thanks a ton!

>The gopher client in gopher1.13.tar.Z uses curses (which I think existed in 2.11BSD)

indeed

>and its Makefile has options to build on at least one version of BSD, but a quick look isn’t telling me if it

>ever built on 2.11BSD

I'll try and report back here. I got sc (spreadsheet calculator) running (also used curses) by pretending to be on 4.3BSD, and overlay definition was the only thing I had to change in the Makefile, so I'm a bit optimistic here.

Thanks again, also for the detailed description how you found it, so I might have better success googling for stuff like this in the future!

HB

[Heinz-Bernd Eggenstein]

This seems to work..more or less.

It ( gopher1.13 ) almost compiles out-of-the-box, main obstacle is my version of make  which a) doesn't define the MAKE variable, and b) cannot handle file includes, both have trivial workarounds. Then I made a guess on an overlay grouping, and indeed, the gopher client  builds just fine (I'm not touching the server source for now) !

Ok, I then encountered lots of problems when digging around in gopherspace: html-rendering to text didn't work , maybe because HTML has evolved since those times  :-) Also lots of running out of memory and random crashes, maybe function pointers get passed across overlay boundaries ?

BUT in principle it works, I could go to gopherpedia.com, search for "gopher", navigate the disambiguation , and page thru the text-version of the Wikipedia article. Nice! (You already  feel smarter on the PDP-11 with the possibility to browse Wikipedia :-) ).

Cheers

HBE

[D Gillies]

I don't know about gopher client but have you considered looking for a Lynx client?  A text-based HTTP web browser?  It might only support HTTP 0.9 - i don't remember, but I was using it in 1995 on a PC running FreeBSD.

[Heinz-Bernd Eggenstein]

I did, but HTTP and HTML have evolved so much since the early days that I'm afraid an old client that would fit in PDP-11 memory footprint would be of very limited use in today's web (and newer versions of lynx might be difficult to port to a PDP-11). Gopher however has stayed in limbo or hibernation for decades and is only now being rediscovered, sort of  https://hackaday.com/2021/09/28/gopher-the-competing-standard-to-www-in-the-90s-is-still-worth-checking-out/

HB

[justme1968]

this is an old thread but i just stumbled over gopher from here: 

https://github.com/ObsoleteMadness/gopherclients/tree/main/archives/offbeatinternet/Gopher/Clients/OS/Unix-based/sgopher

it is quite limited and basically allows only text browsing but it compiles on 2.11 bsd out of the box. with a real vt320 or cool retro term and an adjusted baud rate it feel very period appropriate :)

getting a 'proper' text mode browser working (maybe through a proxy like frog find or one of the other proxies) would still be nice. but this might be a start.

  andre

[justme1968]

in the meantime i had a quick go at the full gopher 2.3 source. 

configure runs just fine and with very few tweaks the client compiles alright. 

with some more tweaking and splitting into some overlays the linker is also happy and the binary even starts. it currently crashes on connecting but i think that is probably due to one of my changes. 

so all in all it should be possible to get the original gopher client from about the eight period to run. 

but lynx is a completely different beast. the source alone is more than 10 times the size and configure runs for hours without a result. there is probably no chance of getting it to fit. 

although finding or writing an lighter client (of course with a proxy for ssl and other modern web stuff) is definitely doable. 

  andre