Quite awhile ago, I read a few books, The Cuckoos Egg, The Hacker
CrackDown, and CyberPunk. These books had discussed a bit about Unix, and
how some hackers used those systems. I can't remember if there were
references to gopher, but I'm pretty certain there was references to
finger, with RTM's worm. It was pretty fascinating to me since I had
access to two computers at the time. One was our family 386sx and the
other was our family C64. My brother and I had a lot of interest in our
IBM 386 clone. I saved and installed a modem, and we frequented many local
BBS systems. Nothing we visited was a large multi-user system. Most times
we were battling to get a non-busy signal to our favorite BBS systems.
At the local community college I was taking a Unix course, which I did
have some very restricted access to a Unix system. However nothing in that
basic Unix course really talked much about gopher and finger and their
uses. The hacker stories I read in the books stuck in my mind, and I was
fascinated by the accounts of their ability to explore systems, and obtain
usable information to get to new systems to explore.
Luckily I had a friend (Cito) at the big university in our town and he
gave me access to his UNIX account. Using my MS-DOS and Telix terminal
emulator I dialed into the university Unix system. I had no idea how to do
much, I was still learning in my Unix course, and the university system
seemed so different. During one of the first attempts at using my friend's
account someone must have noticed he was online, and broke into a talk
type session. My typing skills were terrible and my spelling skills were
worse than they are today. The other user was typing to me, and asking
questions. I couldn't respond correctly and my backspace wasn't recognized
to the Unix system. I was panicking as things weren't going well. The
other user typed (I still remember to this day), "I can see you are
choking, .. I'll talk to you later." and the talk session ended. My face
was flush, and I was sweating, those books in my mind, I was going to get
discovered, or worse my friend was going to get into trouble. I
disconnected the session, but it wasn't over.
Later much later at night I dialed back in. I spent hours trying commands;
finger[ing] to see different users and outputs and look for people. During
my Unix session, trying to find something I can confirm, I remembered one
of my other friends was in college at another major university, but ... I
didn't know his username or email. Email wasn't really a huge thing for
MS-DOS users with only accounts on local BBSes. So I spent a long time
trying different things, and I discovered gopher. At this point in my
computing experience, I had very little understanding of linked system via
pages, or WWW, or anything like that. So when I discovered and tried
gopher, I had no idea how it got from one place to another. Eventually
found my friend at the university an hour NW of my home town, UC Davis.
It was pretty exhilarating, but at that time I couldn't truly confirm my
find for over a month. I couldn't email my friend Mani from Cito's Unix
account because he wouldn't have known who was sending the email, those
two friends of mine never met each other. In order to confirm, I had to go
to UC Davis to talk to Mani in person. Although in those days, and
probably still true of today seeing friends wasn't about computer talk,
and most people didn't want to say much in the realms of computer, or
BBSes.
This is my story from the older days 1990's, my first and almost only use
of gopher until recently. At that time finger and gopher were in the
shadow of WWW. It seemed finger was being closed for public access between
systems around that time. Thee memories of it still live on in my mind.
