[HN Gopher] Where Have all the Gophers Gone? Why the Web beat Go...
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Where Have all the Gophers Gone? Why the Web beat Gopher (1999)
Author : alokrai
Score : 49 points
Date : 2020-05-21 12:23 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (ils.unc.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (ils.unc.edu)
| excitom wrote:
| TL;DR Hypertext links and graphics.
| IvyMike wrote:
| The NCSA and Cern web servers had the ability to let users on a
| system publish content from a specially named "~/public_html"
| directory. At UIUC, the engineering labs quietly enabled this
| functionality for all engineering students.
|
| Within a week, dozens of students had their own web pages up, and
| by the end of the year, hundreds did. Encouraged by their initial
| success, this encouraged students to stand up their own web
| servers so they could run cgi scripts, etc.
|
| As far as I knew, there was no equivalent taste-test for
| providers of Gopher content. You either stood up your own server
| or got special access to someone else's server, both of which
| were hard to do at the time.
| RHSeeger wrote:
| RPI had this, too, and I remember taking full advantage of it
| oh so long ago.
| hnzix wrote:
| In the late 90s Oz universities generally gave their students
| email via Pine plus a 10mb web folder as standard. Many STEM
| students made random websites about their hobbies or poetry
| or whatever. It was like a proto Geocities.
| every wrote:
| I still maintain a gopher presence[1] as a mirror. Once it was
| determined that gopher could neither be monetized nor weaponized,
| it was doomed to obscurity. It is an open academic tool for open
| academic purposes. As an aside, I actually saw the initial
| announcement on USENET about CERN releasing something called a
| browser for something else they called the World Wide Web. I
| couldn't see the point since we already had gopher, veronica,
| jughead, et al. Absolutely prescient on my part...
|
| [1]https://gopher.commons.host/gopher://gopher.club/1/users/eve..
| .
| xkapastel wrote:
| > Once it was determined that gopher could neither be monetized
| nor weaponized, it was doomed to obscurity.
|
| This is a cynical rewriting of history. More likely, Gopher
| lost to HTTP due to a combination of random chance, network
| effects, and simply not being as user friendly to e.g. set up a
| server. HTTP was also an "open academic tool" for "open
| academic purposes". Only later, due to HTTP's success, was it
| monetized and "weaponized".
| perl4ever wrote:
| I remember, I think, connecting to the local library to access
| all of the above using a text/curses type interface on a 2400
| bps modem borrowed from my high school. I'm thinking 1993ish?
| cxvxx wrote:
| There is a sort of Gopher "successor" in the works called Gemini
| that was featured recently:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23042424
|
| It aims to fix flaws in the Gopher protocol while still making it
| easy to implement clients.
|
| If you haven't dug into Gopher, there's lots of cool stuff in it
| from ASCII art and old computer manuals to games and lots of
| blogs (called "phlogs"). I suggest grabbing a client and heading
| to the Gopher Lawn to get a taste:
|
| gopher://bitreich.org/1/lawn
|
| (Lynx works as a client, but there are a ton more out there with
| fun UIs.)
| DC-3 wrote:
| I've had a lot of fun with this recently.
|
| One of my favourite gemini sites is this [1] page where a guy
| is hosting music that he's made over the years.
|
| [1] gemini://gemini.circumlunar.space:1965/~sloum/
|
| The platform is really nascent but I think has a lot of
| potential. If I get some time I might hack together a client
| that's better suited to me than the extant ones (although
| bombadillo works great for the moment).
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| I wrote a 15 line Python server behind STunnel and xinetd for
| Gemini; I love the protocol, and where I felt a lot of the
| Gopher world seemed to venerate the old, I think Gemini really
| is a great, low-fat, content oriented protocol and community.
| Come join the fun!
|
| If you want to connect now: Web Portal:
| https://portal.mozz.us/gemini/gemini.circumlunar.space/
| Clients:
| https://portal.mozz.us/gemini/gemini.circumlunar.space/softw...
|
| I'm in the process of writing a Tcl graphical client, to let
| folks hack their browser as if it were a running lisp process.
| For day-to-day browsing, I'm mostly using Elpher right now,
| which is an emacs Gemini and Gopher client written in Elisp,
| and is fantastic.
|
| I'm at gemini://acidic.website/
| enriquto wrote:
| There _are_ still some gopher holes. For instance, the bitreich
| is quite active: gopher://bitreich.org
|
| Some of the content is rather funny, other is a bit too much for
| insiders to be comprehensible. It seems to be a "pure" fork of
| the suckless.org community.
| S_A_P wrote:
| I was in college getting my MIS degree a little before this
| article was written, and gopher was already being described is
| antiquated and vintage technology.
|
| The web had a much broader appeal to me and as soon as I could I
| set up a page on our schools web server. I then took a deep dive
| into CGI scripting and that got me to start coding.
| dang wrote:
| See also:
|
| 2016 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10964366
|
| 2009 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=828995
| ken wrote:
| One thing I never see in these analyses is ease of setting up a
| server. Back when I was in college and got my first computer, I
| could install a simple web server, drop any file in its folder,
| and view that file in my web browser. If it was HTML, and I got
| the HTML wrong, it would still display most of the page.
|
| Gopher wasn't like that at all. I downloaded the Gopher server
| and ran it. Then I put a file in its folder, and it didn't show
| up. You had to (IIRC) write a special index file to tell it how
| to serve each file. If you didn't get it perfectly right, it
| wouldn't show up at all. And of course the error messages and
| documentation were somewhere between "terrible" and "missing".
|
| I wanted Gopher to succeed, because I liked the simple, regular
| organization of information, rather than the crazy anything-goes
| world of the World Wide Web. I just couldn't figure out how to
| get it to work.
| tingletech wrote:
| I remember the first time I read about the web was on gopher.
|
| A few years later (1997), part of my job was to migrate a bunch
| of university gopher holes to the web.
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