Steven Frank, cofounder of Panic Inc., keeps his blog exclusively on gopher: gopher://stevenf.com:70/1. (He there links out to other gopher sites that may be of interest.)
Twitter users had fun trying to figure out wtf to do with that:
I'm cobbling a gopher site for a book of metaphysics. It doesn't work for clients yet, but I have the gopher server in replit here: https://replit.com/@agamus/metaphysikos?v=1
Actually a Gopher client written in Go seems like a natural fit - a quick search finds this one: https://tildegit.org/sloum/Bombadillo - with TUI and vim keybindings for maximum nostalgia...
Off topic: can any suggest the easiest way to run a USENET/NNTP server (open source preferred)? I've Googled a bunch but cannot find a decent solution.
Seems like you got the easiest ways already, but perhaps the most fun way is through the Synchronet BBS system, which will run on Windows, Linux, or *BSD (not sure if this includes OS X...probably, with effort). It's primary purpose of course is to host an ANSI BBS, but it includes services for a web interface to the message base, as well as NNTP, gopher, ftp...heck, even POP/SMTP if you really wanna go nuts. And it'll interface just fine with the old Door games too through something like dosemu.
There is no real connection between the two but Gopher always makes me think of OS/2 since it was the platform I used Gopher on. There was a free PM Gopher client available which was written by an IBM employee on their own time.
That's pretty cool. OS/2 needed more of those things, special software benefits of using the OS. It was such a promising platform...I remember being kind of sad to move along.
Linux started really getting popular during OS/2's waning days but I'm not sure if OS/2 people really migrated or wanted to migrate in that direction.
I suspect not too many did. Most probably switched to Windows 9x on the desktop with Windows NT being the next most common choice. On the server side most of my customers used OS/2 for running Communications Server or LAN Server. These were replaced by Windows NT and Windows NT running SNA Server. SNA Server was one of the worst products I have ever had the misfortune to have to support.
I spent a lot of time on gopher growing up (thanks SCN.org & my public library) but I still preferred simple-style websites then and do now...for some weird reason. I do find that I like at least a tiny bit of metaphor in some visual way. Could be a single tiny .gif icon even.
Gopher's still pretty fun, just a bit of an interest stacking order.
> Is there a reason why gopher is seeing a resurgence in the tech sphere?
I think it's largely a demonstrative reaction against the appification of the web, built upon gopher’s more limited interface which is more heavily optimized to a read-only hypertext use case, which fits a lot of people's nostalgic idealization of the early web.
> Is there a reason why gopher is seeing a resurgence in the tech sphere?
I think it's largely a demonstrative reaction against the commercialization of the web, built upon gopher’s more limited interface which is more heavily optimized to a read-only hypertext use case, which fits a lot of people's nostalgic idealization of the early web
Where X isn't part of the path name, it's one-character file type code. This code is client-side only and determine how the client downloads and interprets the file. Gopher has 2 separate ways of sending files - Binary files are sent as-is. Text/Menu files are sent line-oriented, with a CRLF after each line and a trailing . CR LF at the end. Again, the type code is on the client side and is not sent to the server.
It's uncomfortable not just to read this, but also to be reminded of so many weird protocols and schemes from way back when.
It brings to mind a box where I used to work, full of forgotten hardware that never really caught on. It was fun to check it out in some ways, but when discussing the pain points there was usually an audible groan from someone nearby.
As enthusiastic as I get about 'vintage' tech, it's sobering to hear someone note the bumpy road that led us to the slick technologies we take for granted today.
It sounds like you have some interesting stories to tell. Can you give an example of something that sticks out in your memory?
For me the most annoying side-effect of this is that there's no way to signify an error in the server response, or even have errors rendered sensibly. Many servers just send errors in gophermap form (type 1), which can wind up being rendered as plain text or interpreted as binary data by the client, depending on the URL.
The one advantage to this approach is that you can always convince a client to show you the source of gopher://host/1index by requesting gopher://host/0index.
> It's free from monstrous JS frameworks. More information, less apps.
100%. The craptastic-ness of the modern JS web is driving a broader resurgence in things you might call "indie web" or "retro web". In addition to gopher, the Gemini protocol seems to be gaining traction and has a fairly active community.
This has me thinking of how stovepiped Javascript + HTML + CSS apps are. Sure, you can do anything, but there are some things that are just easy. The current web feels like a progression of a few people figuring out a new trick, and then everyone adopting it at the same time.
I wonder what the web would have looked like if the web had been more like Hypercard. I think back to high school, with some students delivering their history projects as multimedia hypercard stacks on floppy disk. Weird times those were. And for as weird and unique as Geocities websites were, they all fit the page model.
The web feels like it's never been fully unconstrained in the way that something like Hypercard or Squeak were. We moved a lot of the analog world to the digital world in a hurry. At the start of it all, there was intense skepticism about the digital replacements for analog things because the digital thing more often than not sucked by comparison. I think Hypercard is evidence of a time when computer companies felt they were competing with a richer set of analog alternatives.
There's a resurgence in general against the "bloated web" where a chunk of people move back towards primarily text-based sharing of information and simplicity.
This drive is expressed in many different ways both in the frontend and backend. In a way, static site generators were a reaction to complex CMS systems. Another expression is people going back to retro design using only basic features provided by HTML / CSS with minimal (audio)visual cues. Or even just publishing text.
Then there's people who feel that even HTTP and HTML are bloated themselves, and move away wholesale from the Web towards a parallel world which has been coined by some as "smolweb" or "dorkweb"
A major catalyst is the Gemini protocol which emerged a few short years ago and gained some popularity. In the wake of that, people re-discovered the Gopher protocol as well.
I think these communities are niches driven by similar motivations as, say, aficionados of BBS systems or ham radio. That is, the aspect of tinkering, being in control and not being hampered by complexity and inherent restrictions. Plus the ability to create an independent community of like-minded souls. And, sure enough, a sense of nostalgia as well.
One could note the quaintness associated with this resurgence, but it's tied into a philosophical debate regarding online freedom and privacy as well. Unlike the Web, these protocols lack all kinds of affordances making it far harder (but not impossible) to track people across the Gopherverse or the Gemini space.
Sometimes, you just go online because you want to read about something. These days, it feels that most place on the web are designed to, well, do most anything other than let you have what you want to read without at the very least distracting the crap out of you, and often tracking you all over the place and suggesting that you read (or more often, WATCH) these other things that aren't actually what you asked for, and would you look at the time...
It's a lot like how some people read books sometimes even though movies are available.
There is not even a JRE anymore. I guess they just don’t want to ship separate exe files to different platforms, but to answer your question, a modern JDK should work just fine.
Worth mentioning: the German daily "taz", one of the bigger newspapers (green/liberal/left leaning), offers to this day a full text Gopher site: gopher://taz.de, even as onion service gopher://ibpj4qv7mufde33w.onion
Not _that_ related, but why does everyone use monospace in these types of programs? I get that it looks nice, but you can re-produce the general look in a proportional font that's infinitely easier on the eyes.
I typically use gopherus[0]. Besides unixlikes, it works on DOS (I use it with FreeDOS), and has very low requirements (I believe it works on 8086 PCs).
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[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 132 ms ] threadTwitter users had fun trying to figure out wtf to do with that:
https://twitter.com/playdate/status/1520144706511904768
Codevoid: gopher://codevoid.de
Quux: gopher://gopher.quux.org
Floodgap - generalist gopher portal with lots of links - gopher://gopher.floodgap.com/
Cosmic voyage: collective writing experiment - gopher://cosmic.voyage
Bongusta - phlogs aggregator & community - gopher://i-logout.cz:70/1/bongusta/
SDF - phlogs aggregator & community - gopher://sdf.org
Tildeverse: aggregator for tilde communities - gopher://tildeverse.org
Gopherpedia: reading Wikipedia through Gopher because why not - gopher://gopherpedia.com:70/1/
gopher://GiantGopher.com:70/
Games you can play on Gopher:
gopher://worldofsolitaire.com/
gopher://GiantGopher.com:70/--/Winnifred_Huck
There was another HN Gopher thread recently:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31392145#31410764
gopher://sdf.org
gopher://mozz.us
gopher://bitreich.org
gopher://hngopher.com (heh).
It’s a shame it wasn’t written in Go for maximum confusion
Most web sites about it are in German, but the program itself has English language UI, as well.
There is also the derivative Hamster Next, which does proper server-to-server peering.
[1]: https://public-inbox.org/README.html
https://synchro.net/
https://hackaday.com/2021/09/28/gopher-the-competing-standar...
a starting point is gopher://gopher.floodgap.com:70
The name reminds me of the old Anarchie FTP search client :) Probably not the intention, but similar era.
This is bringing back quite some nostalgia - the internet used to be so much different!
Linux started really getting popular during OS/2's waning days but I'm not sure if OS/2 people really migrated or wanted to migrate in that direction.
Gopher's still pretty fun, just a bit of an interest stacking order.
Honest question, if you like it I'm not trying to put you down, but I just don't see how it's any better or worse than HTTP
I think it's largely a demonstrative reaction against the appification of the web, built upon gopher’s more limited interface which is more heavily optimized to a read-only hypertext use case, which fits a lot of people's nostalgic idealization of the early web.
I think it's largely a demonstrative reaction against the commercialization of the web, built upon gopher’s more limited interface which is more heavily optimized to a read-only hypertext use case, which fits a lot of people's nostalgic idealization of the early web
A gopher URL looks like: gopher://host/Xfile
Where X isn't part of the path name, it's one-character file type code. This code is client-side only and determine how the client downloads and interprets the file. Gopher has 2 separate ways of sending files - Binary files are sent as-is. Text/Menu files are sent line-oriented, with a CRLF after each line and a trailing . CR LF at the end. Again, the type code is on the client side and is not sent to the server.
It brings to mind a box where I used to work, full of forgotten hardware that never really caught on. It was fun to check it out in some ways, but when discussing the pain points there was usually an audible groan from someone nearby.
It sounds like you have some interesting stories to tell. Can you give an example of something that sticks out in your memory?
The one advantage to this approach is that you can always convince a client to show you the source of gopher://host/1index by requesting gopher://host/0index.
It's free from monstrous JS frameworks. More information, less apps.
100%. The craptastic-ness of the modern JS web is driving a broader resurgence in things you might call "indie web" or "retro web". In addition to gopher, the Gemini protocol seems to be gaining traction and has a fairly active community.
I wonder what the web would have looked like if the web had been more like Hypercard. I think back to high school, with some students delivering their history projects as multimedia hypercard stacks on floppy disk. Weird times those were. And for as weird and unique as Geocities websites were, they all fit the page model.
The web feels like it's never been fully unconstrained in the way that something like Hypercard or Squeak were. We moved a lot of the analog world to the digital world in a hurry. At the start of it all, there was intense skepticism about the digital replacements for analog things because the digital thing more often than not sucked by comparison. I think Hypercard is evidence of a time when computer companies felt they were competing with a richer set of analog alternatives.
This drive is expressed in many different ways both in the frontend and backend. In a way, static site generators were a reaction to complex CMS systems. Another expression is people going back to retro design using only basic features provided by HTML / CSS with minimal (audio)visual cues. Or even just publishing text.
Then there's people who feel that even HTTP and HTML are bloated themselves, and move away wholesale from the Web towards a parallel world which has been coined by some as "smolweb" or "dorkweb"
see: https://thedorkweb.substack.com/p/gopher-gemini-and-the-smol...
A major catalyst is the Gemini protocol which emerged a few short years ago and gained some popularity. In the wake of that, people re-discovered the Gopher protocol as well.
I think these communities are niches driven by similar motivations as, say, aficionados of BBS systems or ham radio. That is, the aspect of tinkering, being in control and not being hampered by complexity and inherent restrictions. Plus the ability to create an independent community of like-minded souls. And, sure enough, a sense of nostalgia as well.
One could note the quaintness associated with this resurgence, but it's tied into a philosophical debate regarding online freedom and privacy as well. Unlike the Web, these protocols lack all kinds of affordances making it far harder (but not impossible) to track people across the Gopherverse or the Gemini space.
It's a lot like how some people read books sometimes even though movies are available.
Is there a reason for that, aren't current Java versions compatible?
I've also seen that with Freeplane, and it's always a stumbling block.
I do wish non-TUI Gopher clients would at least experiment with proportional typefaces, though.
0. http://gopherus.sourceforge.net/
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/220349551_The_Hyper...