Gopher still lives
Unless you were using the Internet before the World Wide Web came along, you probably never heard of the Gopher protocol or the search facilities called Archie and Veronica. I didn’t realize that Gopher still lived until I saw an Ars Technica post, The Web may have won, but Gopher tunnels on. It brought me back to the days when almost everything was text and modem speeds were a few kilobits/sec. The name “Gopher” came from the University of Minnesota mascot. Here’s an excerpt from Ars Technica:
So it was no surprise that when University of Minnesota researchers developed an early protocol for organizing and sharing documents over the Internet, they named it “gopher.” The initial version of the protocol appeared in 1991; by 1993, it had been codified as a Request for Comment (RFC 1436) that laid out the protocol in some detail.
According to the RFC, gopher was designed as a client-server protocol running over TCP/IP. Much lighter than HTTP and HTML, gopher provided essentially two options: menus and documents, both of which were accessed through port 70. The system was initially text-based, though basic image serving ability came later. There was no decorative markup for menu pages, which all looked basically (and boringly) the same; on the other hand, gopher was quick and consistent.
The post goes on to describe how you can still use Gopher. A few servers remain and Firefox still supports the Gopher protocol. Internet Explorer does not. If you have Firefox, try pasting “gopher://gopher.floodgap.com/1/world” (without quotes) into the address bar. Note how the term “gopher” is used in the URL instead of “http”.
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