coo...@utopia.cc.nd.edu 10/29/92 Several people wonder out loud: > Excuse me for not knowing, but what is CSO? "What is CSO"  (short) CSO (evidently shortened from "CCSO" at U. Illinois Urbana-Champaign,   their computing services organization) is an electronic directory   service, a queryable database containing information about people and   things.  Lots of universities and organizations have set up CSO   nameservers and loaded them up with student, faculty, and staff   public information (things like e-mail address, campus address and   phone, and things like that. When you search some electronic phonebooks using Gopher, you are   using CSO--the or (CSO) or "P" or little phonebook icon   is the visual cue that you are dealing with a CSO nameserver. You may have heard/read about "ph" and "qi" in addition to CSO.  They   are all parts of the same system.  Ph is the client software that   does the querying.  Qi is the server side. If you want to take a look at the long version of this, I have put up   U. Illinois' and Northwestern's CSO/Ph introductory documents on   Notre Dame's gopher (gopher.nd.edu 70) in the "About the ND Gopher"   directory.  I'll leave them there for a few days.  These documents   are the text of what you would see if you queried the help system on   either of these servers. If there are other questions, perhaps they can come directly to me   and not to this list since this _is_ supposed to be about Gopher   stuff.  :-) Joel --- ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Joel P. Cooper                         Phone: 219-239-7221 Asst. Director, Networking Services    Fax:   219-239-8201 Office of University Computing         Email: coo...@utopia.cc.nd.edu University of Notre Dame Notre Dame, IN  46556     "Gentlemen!  You can't fight in here!  This is the War Room!" ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ ========== COMMENTS ========== CSO is perfectly relevant to gopher.  CSO is one of the search mechanisms built into gopher.   If you want to set up phone book searches in gopher, CSO seems to be the method of choice. -Dave -- David Giller, Box 134 | Q: How many Oregonians does it take to screw in a light Occidental College    | bulb?  A: Three.  One to replace the bulb, and two to 1600 Campus Road      | fend off all the Californians trying to share the Los Angeles, CA 90041 | experience. ---------------------------rafetmad@oxy.edu ========== COMMENTS ========== Gopher is a simple, easy-to-implement, probably kludgy, but certainly efficient way to connect the numerous existing CSO/qi/ph servers to the Internet. qi servers -- until gopher started to dig holes in people's minds -- were bound to the organization they serve. With gopher, I can readily find the address/phone-#/e-mail address of people I worked with in Texas some years back. So can they. That is basically what the X.500 people have been promising us for years. There is one difference: Gopher works; X.500 works sometimes. No religion wars! No Flames! We run a gopher server, qi server, _and_ an X.500 server. Thank you. +-----------   Andi Karrer, Communication Systems, ETH Zuerich, Switzerland   kar...@bernina.ethz.ch    - Objects in mirror are closer than they appear ========== COMMENTS ========== CSO is actually a misnomer.  Outside of Gopher, nobody refers to "ph Nameservers" as "CSO's." In fact, here at the University of Illinois, where the program was originally developed by Steven Dorner,  all references to "CSO" have been changed to CCSO in the written documentation and online help.  The term CCSO Nameserver refers specifically to the implementation of the qi/ph programs here at the U of I, which are managed by our Computing and Com- munications Services Office.  The rest of the world generally refers to the program as "ph".  In fact there is a newsgroup for maintainers of ph databases called info.ph (not info.cso).  I don't know why the Gopher folks decided to call these directories "CSO's", but PH or Ph Servers would be more appropriate. -- _________________________________________ Lynn Ward l-w...@uiuc.edu Network Design Office, 1541 DCL 244-0681