New Gopher on the Prairie
The year was 1992 or so, and on the front counter of Cornell's Ag & Life
Science Library was a terminal that offered easy access to all sorts of
resources and information, including weather (useful in Ithaca, where morning
sun could turn to 8+ inches of snow by afternoon on any given winter day),
sports scores, and more. Some of those services were offered using gopher, a
cross-system information system that disappeared when something called the
World Wide Web overran it with a more compelling interface, graphics, and a
less menu-driven approach. I got used to using it, and grew to like it.
There was something homely and honest about gopher. In those days, the Internet
was alive and vibrant, but it consisted of telnet and FTP sites, and
information servers running things like WAIS and Veronica. Gopher excelled at
file and information delivery in an age when content mattered and style issues
weren't even an option. Gopher is a distributed document search and retrieval
network protocol whose gopher protocol offers some features not natively
supported by the Web. One distinguishing factor is that it imposes a much
stronger hierarchy on information stored on it. Its text menu interface is
well-suited to computing environments that rely heavily on remote computer
terminals, common in universities at the time of its creation. Some consider it
to be the superior protocol for storing and searching large repositories of
information.
I wouldn't necessarily argue that it's a better protocol, but I do have some
appreciation for the ascetic draw of plain text files organized efficiently. So
I've redone this site in gopher. If you've got access to a browser that can
read the gopher protocol (Unix users: lynx is your best bet; Firefox users, see
the overbite project for a simple/effective plug-in; everyone else: get a
better browser!), have a look at
gopher://therandymon.com. It's fun to write
out a URL that doesn't start with HTTP, because gopher doesn't necessarily do
hypertext. It's up to date, meaning the 250+ articles on this site,
representing 10+ years of writing, not to mention all the Woodnotes Guides I
offer in PDF, and a couple new things I'm thinking of, are now all part of the
gopher universe. Not sure, but it's potentially one of the bigger gopher sites
out there! Not bad for an information nostalgist.
I'm not hugely impressed with the direction the WWW has taken recently. It's
refreshing (if nothing else) to visit a simpler time, when the most important
word in the lexicon was information, not "big data" or "javascript framework."
Now: get offa my lawn. (Many thanks to the Oklahoma Farm Report for the gopher
image!)
