## State Of Gopher
State Of Gopher
by
Christoph Lohmann <
[email protected]>
## Gopher Anthem
Minnesota, hats off to thee,
to thy colors, true we shall ever be.
Firm and strong, united are we.
Rah! Rah! Rah! for Ski-U-Mah,
Rah! Rah! Rah! Rah!
Rah for the U of M!
Rah for the U of M!
## Gopher Anthem
Minnesota, hats off to thee,
to thy colors, true we shall ever be.
Firm and strong, united are we.
Rah! Rah! Rah! for Ski-U-Mah,
Rah! Rah! Rah! Rah!
Rah for the U of M!
Rah for the U of M!
## Gopher Anthem
M-I-N-N-E-S-O-T-A!
Minnesota!
Minnesota!
Yeeeeeeaaaaaaaah ...
GOPHERS!!!
## Veronica Statistics
2017: 133 gopher servers, 4.9 mio. unique selectors
2018: 260 gopher servers, 3.7 mio. unique selectors
2019: 320 gopher servers, 4.2 mio. unique selectors
2020: 395 gopher servers, 4.5 mio. unique selectors
2021: 361 gopher servers, 6.0 mio. unique selectors
2022: 325 gopher servers, 5.0 mio. unique selectors
Sadly servers were lost.
## Gopher Lawn Stats
Up from 2021 to 2022 by two entries.
All maintainers are welcome, it is very easy.
git://bitreich.org/gopher-lawn
## Tildeverse
* tildeverse.org
| we're a loose association of like-minded tilde communities. if you're
| interested in learning about *nix (linux, unix, bsd, etc) come check out our
| member tildes and sign up!
% printf "/\r\n" | nc tildeverse.org 70 | grep "^h" \
| grep website | sort | uniq | wc -l
36
Up by nine from last year!
## Gopher is at a steady state.
Despite individual servers going away, content is created.
Unique content is created.
## Gopher is your daily protocol.
With gopher supported everywhere, I at least, end up with
a mix of gopher and https every day.
The protocol distinctions are simply gone.
## Bitreich Services
See the State of Bitreich Talk.
* Ideas Project
* Bithub for intellectual porn
* Bitreich TV
* Meme service
* The Lawn
* Friendless Network
* Snowmen Project
* Onion Initiative
## Bitreich Services
* Meme University
* Dance Academy
* XML Strip Club
* Tutorials Project
* VLA movement
* Penis Extension Service
* Bitreich OneLine for free gopherspace trial codes
* Kiosk
## Bitreich Services
* Dating
* BitLeeks
* BitLeaks
* OnlyFans
* Pilot Service
* Cancelman Hiring Service
* Empty the Fridge Service
* Digitalisation Addicts Anonymous
## Bitreich Services
* Conferencing System
* Stop Scrum
* The Gopher Times
* BitTwiddle
* Gameroom
* BitreichNFT
* Gopher Vulture Standard
* Gopher Blue Seal
* T-R-U-S-T programme
* ...
Extending more, based on daily input.
## Bitreich Services
We are reaching a point, where it is impossible for one member to know
all services available.
Which is good.
This removes boredom.
## Gopher Vulture Standard
The web is lying to you, gopher is not.
.-'`\-,/^\ .-. .-. /^\,-/`'-.
/ | \ ( ee\ __ __ /aa ) / | \
| | |__/,--.`"` `, ,' `"`.--,\__| | |
| / .__/ `"""",/ \,""""` \__. \ |
| / / | | \ \ |
.'.-' /__/ GOPHER VULTURE \__\ '-. '.
`"`| |';-;_` `_;-;'| |`"`
jgs |/ /-)))))) ((((((-\ \|
## The Gopher Vulture Standard
Gopher is lonely and needs to evolve towards new standards of robbing people
off their dignity, personal rights and sanity.
There is no way to make money off gopher and advertising YET.
Gopher Vulture is here to provide you with a standard for FULL EXPLOITATION
of all of your users for the gain of your bank account and your dogs.
## The Gopher Vulture Standard
If you introduce Gopher Vulture to your gopherhole, users are required
to send in one body part in a cooling box right to your front door. This
will prove that they are rightfully willing to participate in the experience
you are providing them over gopher.
The contract is signed with blood. No further procedure needed.
After this contract signing you can exploit the users as you like. No
restrictions, like filthy EU data laws, apply.
## The Gopher Vulture Standard
See what Meta and Mozilla have done so far:
https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/privacy-preserving-attribution-for-advertising/
## Blue Gopher Seal
The Blue Gopher Seal is a label that the product using it
* is ispirational
* saves resources
* is energy efficient
* allows you to see its source code
* can be reused to anyone's pleasure
gopher://bitreich.org/1/blue-gopher
Maybe we can spread the seal more?
## Goals reached so far.
Some goals have been reached so far:
* Gopher is established and known as simple protocol.
* Gopher is revived, is living and has an alive community.
* New ideas flourish on gopher, which means it has a bright future.
* Gopher support is in the major commandline tools and libraries.
* Today we are holding the seventh conference on gopher!
We can be proud of ourselves!
## Keeping the Flow: Looking back.
Many things have been done before, but did not succeed due to their
chance in history.
https://www.jumpjet.info/Offbeat-Internet/Gopher/Repository/GopherCon/gc.htm
I will give glimpse ideas of what people were doing back then, to give us
inspiration for how to improve the gopher experience (and avoid the
failures of the past).
Let us together look back!
## Keeping the Flow.
https://www.jumpjet.info/Offbeat-Internet/Gopher/Repository/\
GopherCon/GC94/Presentations/GEN1=1994_State_of_the_Gopher.txt
Client software architectures
-It will always be a multi-protocol world
-Monolithic network applications have limited future
-A monolithic application is a large, cumbersome swiss-army
knife (would you repair your car or build a house with a
swiss army knife?)
-Small, specialized, communicating applications will have
an advantage
The fall of browsers?
## Keeping the Flow
Future Architecture
-Many application protocols, and continued protocol
development
-Modular protocol-specific client software which plugs
into a user-interface framework
-Many network-aware page description languages that work
with plug-in protocol modules
-We should be trying to do a few things really well
instead of everything poorly
The rise of gopher frontends?
## Keeping the Flow
Why 3-D gopherspace?
-People navigate through 3-D space all the time
-Providing a stronger sense of place and better
landmarks will help users navigate
-Virtual worlds (3-D gopherspace) gives us more
possibilities for visual and aural cues that documents are
closely (or distantly) related
The metaverse on gopher?
## Keeping the Flow
...why 3-D Gopherspace?
-Social intelligence cues can easily be coded into 3-D
space... popular items might appear worn and the beaten
path can be made explicit
-We need to facilitate both finding information and finding
people
-A new user interface metaphor will let us build richer
systems that incorporate interpersonal interaction (imagine
hybrid Gopher / IRC / MUD systems)
Annna? Our IRC system?
## Keeping the Flow
But is this really feasible?
-3-D gopherspace does not have to be a network pig
-We can trade intelligence in the client for bandwidth;
the client generates the scenes itself
-Affordable desktop systems (PowerPC/Pentium) are now
becoming fast enough to render virtual worlds on the fly
-...And it is worth doing because virtual worlds will give
us better metaphors for describing the massive quantity of
resources on the net
Memes?
## Keeping the Flow
https://www.jumpjet.info/Offbeat-Internet/Gopher/Repository/\
GopherCon/GC94/Presentations/EQ1=Information_Quality.txt
What do we want the information to do for us ?
What we really need is not information, but knowledge. We need people
to expand their knowledge of the world, and we want our kids to be able to be
better citizens in the future.
The UNIX philosophy?
## Keeping the Flow
https://www.jumpjet.info/Offbeat-Internet/Gopher/Repository/\
GopherCon/GC93/GopherCon_%2793_Trip_Report.txt
Gopher Front-Ends to Databases (Paul Lindner): A number of efforts have
taken place to integrate both relational and flat-file databases with
Gopher. Two basic methods are common: a "shadow" system, in which
reports are generated from the database and moved into Gopherspace, and
on-line access to an interactive query engine. Paul plans to work
toward integrated Gopher support of one flat-file db (DBase is the most
popular) and one generic SQL db.
A simple dcgi script in geomyidae!
## Sidenote: Keeping the Flow
https://www.jumpjet.info/Offbeat-Internet/Gopher/Repository/\
GopherCon/GC93/GopherCon_%2793_Trip_Report.txt
NEW GOPHER USES AND TOOLS: unless otherwise specified, any tools
mentioned here are said to be available in the archives on
boombox.micro.umn.edu.
Gmail/gmailcal (Prentiss Riddle, Rice University): a
mail-to-gopherspace gateway with an accompanying events calendar
manager.
Anyone wants to sue Gmail?
## Keeping the Flow
https://www.jumpjet.info/Offbeat-Internet/Gopher/Repository/\
GopherCon/GC95/Papers/ScreenScrape.txt
ScreenScraping for Fun & Profit
... If you have
legacy systems (like the web!)
that are not going to migrate to client/server
technology anytime soon, you may want to apply these techniques to
free your data without creating a shadow database system.
...
Modifying this system to use client-server would require a complete
redesign. It would be more economical to start from scratch.
Instead, we designed software that allows students to view
information
from the system using Gopher. By doing this we saved many students
from the need to find and configure special software to start a (web
browser).
The same situation of today, but now from web to gopher.
## Keeping the Flow
https://www.jumpjet.info/Offbeat-Internet/Gopher/Repository/\
GopherCon/GC95/Papers/Cluster.txt
The cluster software should definitely use a better algorithm. We've
had good results with the current one, but don't have that gut level
feeling that the math is entirely theoretically correct.
The reason why 3D is not moving?
## Keeping the Flow
https://www.jumpjet.info/Offbeat-Internet/Gopher/Repository/\
GopherCon/GC93/GopherCon_%2793_Trip_Report.txt
ACROBAT DEMO: Gary Cosimini of Adobe gave a talk on a very
interesting forthcoming product called Acrobat ... PDF ...
If it catches on this would be a good candidate for a Gopher data
type and could solve many document incompatibility problems.
This has been achieved in modern gopher times!
## Thinking ahead?
https://www.jumpjet.info/Offbeat-Internet/Gopher/Repository/\
GopherCon/GC95/Papers/Hyper-G.txt
The client-server protocol of Hyper-G is a connection oriented
protocol instead of a connectionless protocol as implemented in Gopher
or WWW. This allows it to implement user access rights and billing
mechanisms in Hyper-G.
The Hyper-G server itself is based on a distributed network database
architecture with separated database engines for documents and
hyperlinks. Using this concept the whole world of Hyper-G servers
presents itself to the user as one large single database with no need
to know server addresses to access single servers. The server
structure is completely hidden to the user.
Facebook?
## Summary from 1992
https://www.jumpjet.info/Offbeat-Internet/Gopher/Repository/\
GopherCon/GC92/GopherCon_%2792_Trip_Report.txt
OVERVIEW BY THE GOPHER DEVELOPERS: The conference began with an
overview by Mark McCahill and Farhad Anklesaria, two members of the
Gopher Team at Minnesota. I liked their summary of the two initial
goals for Gopher:
-- To provide the plumbing for a great CWIS.
-- To be "Internet duct tape" for connecting a wide variety of
networked services.
Although many of us at the conference tended to be driven by the demand
for one or the other of these, ultimately they go together nicely.
## Keeping the Flow Summary
The gopher history and archives give us ideas of the past, which
fit to the present.
#pause
We can reuse this and adapt it to modern technology easily. See
the memes and AI on annna.
#pause
There is so much to do on gopher, which is unique.
#pause
Everyone is invited to this adventure!
## Keeping the Flow Summary
Gopher is alive.
#pause
Gopher has so many ideas.
#pause
Learning from the past will make us duct-tape gopher to new technology.
#pause
Gopher is here to stay.
## Thanks
Thank you for listening!
If you have further comments, contact me at
Christoph Lohmann <
[email protected]>
