> So if you were using Gopher in the '90s, I'd love to read what you have
> to say. How was the Gophersphere browsing different from WWW. Especially
> what kind of Gopher holes disappeared before any indexes or archives
> were made.
I was using Gopher in the 90s, before WWW was really a thing, or at least a
thing accessible to me.
I grew up in a very rural part of Kansas. There were zero services of any type
that were a local call for me. BBSs, CompuServe, AOL, everything was
long-distance, and expensive at that. So to further my hobby, I had to be
resourceful.
I remember being on a trip to the DC area when I would have been about 13. I
took some floppies with me. I remember finding computer labs, I think at the
University of Maryland, where I could download things off the Internet. One of
them was a NeXT lab and I had never seen a NeXT and had no idea how to do
anything with it at the time, sadly. This would have been shortly before I
discovered FreeBSD and Linux.
Eventually I wound up with various ways to get terminal access to the Internet.
To cut a very long story shorter, basically before Gopher, I had:
- FTP
- email
- finger
- archie
yeah, that was about it. archie was a search engine for finding things on FTP
sites. FTP was clunky back then; you would have to download something and then
switch out of FTP to read it. You'd have to disconnect from a server and
connect to another to hop between boxes. You can still experience this with the
command-line "ftp" program in various Unices. Don't run it in a graphical
environment though, because we usually couldn't back then anyhow.
So Gopher was a nice innovation. Menus, cross-server links made easy, document
viewing without separate downloading, etc. I remember having access to a system
that had Pine for email, ftp, and gopher. I often used the UMN gopher home and
went out from there. It definitely didn't displace FTP; it augmented it.
PPP became available in my area in the mid- to late 90s, and then I also the web
available when I went to college. Web browsers at the time supported gopher,
HTTP, and FTP, so Netscape was a decent gopher browser.
However, particularly once web search engines started to become decent, my usage
of Gopher declined, until I picked up the interest in it again maybe 5-7 years
later and wrote pygopherd.
UMN was rather stingy about the licensing around Gopher - though it should be
noted the same applies to the licensing around Netscape and Pine. It was not
entirely appreciated in the Free Software community at the time for that reason.
I am grateful that they eventually opened it up.
- John