A PURE-HARDWARE GOPHER CLIENT
I was thinking about how it's a shame that there isn't much
electronics stuff on Gopher. Particularly my favourite sort of
electronics - without microcontrollers, just pure digital or
analogue circuitry fixed in a opimised system to efficiently perform
one ideal purpose. Then of course I realised that I was part of the
problem because all of my electronic projects are documented on the
web. Yet I can't mirror them here because I'll loose my anominity,
and they probably won't mean much to the average gopherspace
explorer anyway.
So I thought that what I really need is an electronics project just
for my gopher hole. Something that would mean enough to Gopher users
that it would be worth documenting it here instead of on the web. As
an internet protocol, Gopher exists purely in the software domain
that I prefer to avoid for fun personal projects. But Gopher is so
very simple that I wonder if I could design a software-less,
CPU-less, client to browse it with?
From a user-interface point of view, the challenge isn't much
greater than with a standard hardware terminal. Historical examples
of commercial hardware terminals are well known, I think I even saw
a prject to restore one in someone's Gopher hole. But they also have
a long DIY history, beginning with Don Lancaster's TV Typewriter:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TV_Typewriter
I've got his later books "Cheap Video Cookbook" and "Son of Cheap
Video" that detail derivatives of this design, reducing the part
count by including the more advanced ICs introduced in the late 70s
and early 80s, and also increasing the line length/count to
something that would be vaguely usable for viewing Gopher content.
They are a good basis for a terminal which might be easily adapted
to treat specially any lines with a tab chacter, storing them in a
separate buffer where they can be retreived and their corresponding
link followed.
A modern design for a terminal built with TTL logic, for a VGA
monitor instead of a regular TV, is here:
http://debuginnovations.com/TTL_Terminal/home.html
Though that does use a microcontroller for the UART and PS2 keyboard
input. I understand this decision, but I'm a purist through and
through and wont accept a CPU anywhere in a Pure-Hardware Gopher
Client. Still, it could be adapted to work TTL-only.
But the other main difficulty is the TCP/IP stack. Attempting to do
this with TTL logic would be much more difficult than just dealing
with the Gopher protocol. But I'm not contraining myself to TTL or
discrete logic only, just a CPU-less client, so I can use one of the
TCP/IP Ethernet chips from Wiznet:
https://www.wiznet.io/product/tcpip-chip/
I won't deny that even with these resources to draw on, this will be
a very difficult project, but at first inspection it seems possible.
I don't have the time for it at the moment (and have plenty of other
projects that I ought to finish first anyway), but one day I think
it would be good fun to attempt.
- The Free Thinker, 2020.
