# Responses to The state of gopher

Thank you all for your kind words and consideration regarding the
problems I, and others, encounter using gopher at the present time.
Clearly there are a lot of opinions, but the following will always
remain true:

1. Vintage hardware has a physical 80 character limit. It is a thing,
   and a large body of people still use it. Unless you have X running
   on Linux / UNIX then you are also probably stuck with an 80
   character limit.

2. Many gopher clients exist, and are in use, that are written to
   that RFC specification and will never be retrospectively changed. 

3. The UMN gopher client ships with most Linux and BSD systems and
   may be many peoples first experience of gopher.

4. RFC exist so that we can all play nice together. They were written
   in gentle times by academics that expected them to be followed.

5. Mutually giving each other permission to disregard RFC, due to age
   or what has become common and doesn't affect you or your cloister,
   doesn't make it right. See point 4.


If you don't like the limitations of the protocol then please make
one or use one that better suits your requirements, Gemini?

----

I would like to take this opportunity to ask the community what
clients[1] they are currently using?


[1](gopher://gopher.icu/1/poll?poll=1707390454)

* All contents 100% gopher friendly