Gopher still going
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Gopher, developed in 1991 at the University of Minnesota, is a text-only,
hierarchical document search and retrieval protocol that was supplanted by the
more flexible WWW in the mid-1990s. Some servers running this old protocol are
still alive, however. The WELL, an online discussion board and community that
started back in 1985, is still running a Gopher server. If you've got a recent
version of Firefox, you can check it out in its original Gopher-y state at
gopher://gopher.well.com/ or with any web browser at
http://gopher.well.com:70/.
It seems to have been frozen in early 1996 or so and houses several historical
documents from the early 1990s. Many of the links are dead and some documents
cannot be found, but poking around for 20 minutes or so, I found:
1994 edition of Hobbes' Internet Timeline. The current version is here.
Interviews from MONDO 2000, including William Vollman, Brenda Laurel, and
a conversation between David Byrne and Timothy Leary.
Scripts from a 1993 program on NBC called Almost 2001, "a 5-part series on
Telecommunications and Technology".
Highways of the Mind, an essay by Roger Karraker from 1991 on the future
of technology and globally networked humanity.
A 1972 article by then-journalist Al Gore about the leader of a communal
settlement in Tennessee.
A profile and history of The WELL from September 1993.
Some miscellaneous writings, including some stuff by Bruce Sterling.
One of the articles by Sterling, his remarks from a privacy conference in
1994, touches on a topic that's still hotly debated today:
I've been asked to explain why I don't worry much about the topics of
privacy threat raised by this panel. And I don't. One reason is that these
scenarios seem to assume that there will be large, monolithic
bureaucracies (of whatever character, political or economic) that are
capable of harnessing computers for one-way surveillance of an
unsuspecting populace. I've come to feel that computation just doesn't
work that way. Being afraid of monolithic organizations especially when
they have computers, is like being afraid of really big gorillas
especially when they are on fire.
I don't follow Sterling's writing that closely, but I wonder if he's changed
his mind on this issue?
Matisse Enzer helped set up The WELL's Gopher server and tells how it came to
be on his blog. And here are a few other Gopher servers that are still running:
gopher://aerv.nl/1
gopher://hal3000.cx/1
gopher://quux.org/1
gopher://sdf.lonestar.org/11/users
http://gopherproject.org/Software/Gopher
