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About:
This is the new permanent home for our
page on the history of the Gopher protocol, its growth, its capabilities, and
its eventual decline in popularity, it should remain hosted here on Code Ghost
for as long as anyone wants it, thanks for visiting.
Contact:
If you want to get in contact
regarding any errors or omissions in the description of the gopher protocol,
then contact us at: [email protected]
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What is Gopher? (in an internet context )
Gopher is a protocol system, which in
advance of the World Wide Web, allowed server based text files to be
hierarchically organised and easily viewed by end users who accessed the
server using Gopher applications on remote computers. Initially Gopher browsers
could only display text-based files before developments such as HyperGopher,
which were able to handle simple graphic formats though they were never used
on a widespread basis as by this time the World Wide Web and its Hypertext
Transfer Protocol (HTTP) were gaining in popularity, and had similar and more
extensive functions.
The origins of the Gopher protocol
The Gopher protocol and original Gopher
viewer application were first developed at the University of Minnesota in the
early 1990’s as part of the drive to make use of the Internet to enable the
simple sharing of documents with people who could be located in institutions
on opposite sides of the country or even the world, and to have those
documents organised so that similar / related pages would be easily
accessible. The value of the Gopher system was enhanced by the development of
two systems known as Veronica and Jughead which allowed a user to search
across resources stored in Gopher file hierarchies on a global basis. As for
the naming of the system, the University of Minnesota sports teams were
called the ‘Golden Gophers’ and the sports mascot was thus a large gopher, it
has been said that the protocol was named in honour of the mascot, and also
as in an assistant who's sent to ‘go for’ things.
What happened to it?
By the mid 1990s the World Wide Web was
growing at a huge rate, and given that the Web’s Hypertext Transfer Protocol
(HTTP) and its browser Mosaic could match the functions of the Gopher
protocol and additionally offer added functions such as hyper linking from
within HTML files which brought together related pages more efficiently than
Gopher, there was no longer a compelling reason to choose the Gopher system.
Another advantage the early Web had over Gopher was the decision of the
University of Minnesota not to definitively rule out the option of exercising
its intellectual property rights over the Gopher protocol, for any other
organisation deciding whether to devote time, effort, and expense to adopting
one of the systems the possibility of getting locked into a technology that
they could then find themselves being charged for was good reason to prefer
the World Wide Web. Most of the files and databases that had been available
on Gopher were converted into HTTP compatible formats and made available on
the Web, though for the interested it is still possible to access the Gopher
root directory at the University of Minnesota and a few other
places, but the vast majority of the
other Gopher servers on the Net have since gone offline.
Resources:
· Gopher Protocol @
Wikipedia - Includes
discussion of the early years of the Gopher protocols development, related
technologies, and the remaining availability of Gopher today.
· The Gopher://
manifesto - Document arguing
the case for a whole range of benefits that could stem from a revival of the
gopher protocol.
· Veronica FAQ - Common questions and answers about Veronica, a
title search and retrieval system for use with the Internet Gopher.
· Yahoo! Directory - Selection of Gopher related resources.
© Code Ghost from History of The Gopher
Protocol, scripts from C4025.
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