Let's talk about plain text
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This entry was originally published at
https://paszternak.me/blog/plain-text
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I love plain text. Probably this is the reason behind my love towards Markdown[0] -- and probably this is the reason behind my love towards Kirby[1].
I love everything plain text. I love log files, I love txt files, I love quick notes taken in a random text editor, I love files without extension that can be viewed as plain text. Whether it is dark on light or light on dark -- it doesn't matter. The best if it is printed out with a monospace font.
I just cannot resist reading such a document.
As you've probably already noticed, my blog is also kept simple, the text itself dominates your screen and no fancy graphical elements are present.
Now, let's talk about Gopher. Yes, Gopher.
A couple of days ago I encountered a random toot in my Mastodon feed that mentioned Gopher (I can't even remember the context, but it doesn't matter to be honest). I was like
"oh, yeah, Gopher, I remember that stuff. Well, no, I don't actually remember, but I am aware that such a thing existed. Wait, does it still exist? Holy crap, I need to research it, like, NOW."
Yep, those were my initial thoughts. And after digging for a while, I started to remember.
I indeed used Gopher. It was back in 1999 or 2000 in college (LIS major, info research class). I used Gopher at the same time I used telnet and catalog cards actually printed on paper for the first (and probably for the last) time. It was a long time ago.
So I was quite surprised when I found out that SDF is still up and running and the gopherspace is still an existing and active community.
A week ago my father gave me his old laptop, a ThinkPad R60, whether I'd be able to do something with it to make it work. It has 512MB RAM. It was still running Windows XP -- and as you'd imagine, it was barely usable. I spent an evening wiping the whole machine and installing Linux Lite on it. Now this baby runs like hell -- at least under the workload my father expects, which is basically within the "checking email - playing spider solitaire - occasionally googling something just heard" triangle.
So I thought that doing some Gopher stuff would be a nice try to see whether the ThinkPad works as it should be (and also I'd hang on to every single opportunity to type on the most brilliant laptop keyboard ever: an oldschool ThinkPad's).
So I fired up a Terminal and took a deep breath. And you know what? Things slowly started to come back to me. All the UNIX shell commands. All the stuff like creating a gophermap, using Mutt for checking my email, structuring my content. I was happy to donate $3 to SDF to become a validated member. In fact, I sent $5 and will probably upgrade to a lifetime ARPA membership for $36.
Because let me tell you something. Gopher is exactly how the web should look like. One hundred percent information without all the fancy stuff that fucks up the internet and makes websites weight tens of megabytes. My gopherspace "About page" weights exactly 318 bytes and has all the information that is relevant for the gopherspace: who am I and how to contact me.
Gopher, this plain text world, is brilliant. Not only to text fetishists and UNIX geeks, but for all the visually impaired and for all the lovers of simplicity and for all the people who enjoy old school computing.
Thus I am on Gopher. Also, I am more than tempted to re-style this website[2] to mimic plain text and reduce the amount of data downloaded to your device.
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[0]
https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/
[1]
https://getkirby.com
[2]
https://paszternak.me
