Fired up the 8088 today, to see how my different gopher
real estate works in a vintage environment. The WATTCP
version of Gopher works, but not well, especially on my
SDF gopher hole, which is still php/script based, rather
than actual files for end points.
The UMN "Minuet" suite worked quite well, on all my gopher
holes, and all of the others I tested. Since it functions
properly, and is actual vintage software on vintage
hardware, I'm going to say that things are "good enough."
Still, I want to re-work my SDF site, so that important
things are actual text files. Then I'll work with more
gopher clients.
It might sound like a pointless exercise, but I located
sdf, and grex, through an old gopher client, so I feel that
there is some merit in having a clean, functional, proper
gopher hole. Now I just have to do it. Eventually.
I want to say a few words about Minuet while I'm at it.
For an old piece of software, I really enjoyed using it. It
uses the old Borland-C-Style multi-window interface, which
supports both text and graphical modes. On the 8088 I stick
with the text modes, even though I do have a VGA card in
there, because it's much faster. 24 and 43/50 column are
supported.
The software lets you do several things at once, including
Gopher, FTP, HTTP (poorly supported), and Telnet. There are
some windowed utilities as well, such as a calculator and
calendar. It also has finger, which is functional in my
limited testing.
All in all, for a slow computer running DOS, it's the kind
of software that makes you feel like you can actually be a
little productive, even in today's fast-paced-computing
world. It was pleasant, and I was able to pretty easily
read up on the phlogs that I like to follow.
