In the beginning there was chaos. Then came the ARPANET, (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network) a government-funded computer network established in 1969 that would one day lead to the Internet.
In the early days of the internet, many protocols vied for supremacy. The oldest was FTP, or File Transfer Protocol. Birthed from the primordial ooze of the ARPANET, FTP roamed the earth allowing people to upload and download files from various servers. It was a primitive, simple, but functional protocol. It is still fairly widely used for software downloads, but it was never particularly good at information sharing.
In 1991, the Gopher Protocol sprung fully formed from the head of the University of Minnesota (home of the Golden Gophers.) Gopher provided a more organized way to store and view information and files. It also provided good search capabilities with Veronica and Jughead (Now Jugtail) search engines.¹ Gopher provided a simple, easy to navigate menu system. For a while, Gopher dominated the fledgling Internet.
Then came HTTP, HyperText Transfer Protocol and the World Wide Web. This unstoppable juggernaut swept through the Internet pillaging as it went. It provided a more dynamic, less structured way to share information. It was bright and shiny. While Gopher and FTP used generally plain text for pages, the Web used HTML (HyperText Markup Language) which allowed for more formatting options, imbedded images and links, and color! As it has evolved the World Wide Web took on many more new and flashy technologies such as flash animation, shockwave games, java, php, youtube, myspace, facebook, twitter, quicktime, etc. It’s success has been so universal that it is what most folks think of when they think of the internet.
Nowadays, FTP has been relegated to a downloading medium where it rests happily on its laurels, spiting out files whenever someone is kind enough to ask for one. Gopher, driven nearly to extinction, has taken another tack. Despite the small number of actively updated Gopher servers, there is a dedicated movement to maintain and even repopularize Gopherspace. Gopher has taken on the air of a resistance movement. In 2000, Bjorn Karger issued the “Gopher Manifesto” calling for a revitalization of Gopherspace. More recently Cameron Kaiser published “Why Is Gopher Still Relevant?³”
There is active development of Gopher software, particularly server software. The two most common (I’m guessing from my own observations) are Pygopherd and Bucktooth, both for Unix and Unix-like operating systems. Other modern server programs include GoFish, Geomyidae, Aftershock, mgod, PyGS, GN, and Gopher Cannon for Windows.
For browsing Gopher, Mozilla Firefox still supports Gopher, as does the text-based web browser Lynx. On, Windows, there is a new Gopher-specific browser in development, which is made specifically to explore Gopherspace. There is also the original text-based Gopher browser. There is also the Overbite Project, which is a Gopher plug-in for extant web browsers.
There are also three different Gopher search technologies. Besides Jugtail, there is Veronica-2, a rewrite of the original Veronica search, and VISHNU, based on Veronica-2.
Besides the technological side, there are several servers still adding content, including twitter. A list of seven fun gopher sites can be found here. Two active servers that can serve as a good jumping off point into the rest of Gopherspace are gopher://gopher.quux.org/ and gopher://gopher.floodgap.com/ both of which have lists of other active servers here and here.
If you are inclined to join the Gopher resurgence, sdf.lonestar.org offers free Gopherspace hosting where you can set up your own little burrow.
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1. The names for these search engines make for a nice, little footnote. They both stem from an earlier FTP search engine (apparently the world’s first search engine) called Archie (derived from the word archive.) Gopher being by definition² a quirky, little protocol, decided that this primitive search engine must be also named after the Archie Comics character Archie Andrews. Hence Veronica was named after Veronica Lodge from the same comics. Jughead (which stood for Jonzy’s Universal Gopher Hierarchy Excavation And Display) was named after Forsythe Pendleton “Jughead” Jones III, also of Archie Comics fame.
2. Here in this footnote to a footnote, is the definition of the word gopher from RFC 1436: “gopher n. 1. Any of various short tailed, burrowing mammals of the family Geomyidae, of North America. 2. (Amer. colloq.) Native or inhabitant of Minnesota: the Gopher State. 3. (Amer. colloq.) One who runs errands, does odd-jobs, fetches or delivers documents for office staff. 4. (computer tech.) software following a simple protocol for burrowing through a TCP/IP internet.”
3. If this or any other link does not work for you, it is probably because it is a link to Gopherspace and you are using a web browser that no longer supports Gopher. Get Firefox.
