Gopher: Underground Technology
By Lore Sjoberg
Story location:
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,62988,00.html
02:00 AM Apr. 12, 2004 PT
Back in 1992, when "yahoo" was something cowboys yelled and "ebay" was just pig
Latin, the University of Minnesota developed a new way of looking at data on the
Internet. Their protocol, called "gopher" after the UMN mascot, allowed
archivists to present the mishmash of information in a standard format, and
enabled readers to navigate documents on a world of servers using a simple visual
interface.
For a while, it seemed as if gopher might open the Internet up to the
nontechnical masses and usher in a new era of online communication. It very well
might have, if the Web hadn't come along and done it instead.
Mention gopher to a newcomer to the Web and you might get a blank stare. Mention
it to an old-timer and you're likely to see a nostalgic smile. But to a community
of developers and enthusiasts, gopher is alive and kicking. And if they have
their way, it will have a healthy future.
According to a list on Floodgap.com, over 250 active gopher servers are currently
online, serving documents ranging from lawyer jokes to the text of the
Shays-Meehan campaign finance reform bill. Almost half these servers are
affiliated with American colleges and universities, but servers are also located
on every continent but Africa and Antarctica.
One such repository is Quux.org and is maintained by John Goerzen, a 24-year-old
Kansas systems administrator and programmer. In addition to managing what is to
his knowledge the largest actively maintained gopher server in existence, Goerzen
is the developer of a gopher server called PyGopherd, and the maintainer of the
original gopher code from the University of Minnesota.
Goerzen's work on gopher is strictly volunteer, and his main motivation is his
own enjoyment.
"Put most simply, gopher is fun," he explains. "Any programmer with experience
with network programming can write a pretty much full-featured gopher server or
client in a couple of hours."
Another of his motivations is preserving the history of the Internet. "A lot of
gopher sites are disappearing -- running on servers that have been forgotten by
now -- and I wanted to be able to prevent the content on them from disappearing
forever," he said. "I started Quux.org, my gopher site, with that in mind."
Goerzen is not just an archivist, though. He sees a future for gopher in
applications such as data exchange.
"I'm interested in using gopher as a protocol for dynamic information exchange in
a way similar to XML-RPC and SOAP," he says.
He also sees gopher as an excellent alternative to PDA and smartphone Web
browsers.
"Consider this example: Port-a-Goph, a gopher client in development for Palm OS.
Cameron Kaiser wrote this in his spare time and got it working quickly on his own
Palm," he said. "Contrast that with the state of Web browsing on handheld
devices: Despite many years to improve them, I still regularly run across
websites that simply do not render at all, or render so poorly that they are
unusable."
Whatever its future, development for gopher continues. Late last month saw the
release of a gopher module for Apache, allowing the popular open-source Web
server to serve up gopher pages as well as Web pages.
Despite its relative obscurity, gopherspace is accessible to many more Web users
than people realize. Gopher support is built into Mozilla-based browsers
including Firefox, most versions of Netscape and Internet Explorer up to version
5, although the degree of support varies. People who want to stick with the
familiarity of http can use the public gopher proxy at Floodgap.com, which
translates gopher pages into HTML.
Visitors to gopherspace will find a piece of the Internet's history, some of
which, Goerzen says, isn't available anywhere else. They will also find The
Gopher Manifesto, a document praising gopher's simplicity and elegance.
The Gopher Manifesto describes gopher as "a hypertext Eden" that existed before
the clutter and commercialization of the Web. "Is it time for a new Renaissance
on the Internet, to bring back the promise of the early years?" it asks.
Goerzen's take on that question is subdued, but optimistic. "I don't expect
gopher to ever overtake the Web," he says. "I do expect it to continue to exist."
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