The History of Gopher | Hacker News Reader

The History of Gopher

prgmr.com

8 pointseindiran5 comments

There was another thread or part of a thread on gopher, recently. From the OP, I'll cite this bit, because it was also mentioned in that thread and meant, for me, that I didn't have to seek out any additional software (since Firefox dropped gopher support some time ago).

Another good option for using Gopher is Lynx, an old-school text-based browser that was superseded by Netscape, but which is still supported. The completely text-based interface has its own sort of elegance, and I like it when I don’t want to be distracted by all the stuff that yells for your attention on the modern net.

I already had lynx installed. I don't recall explicitly installing it on this particular machine; maybe it comes by default with Ubuntu 16.04?

> Try Gopher if you like the feeling of tech nostalgia. Gopher is part of a bygone age on the net. The simple fact that Veronica used a database of every Gopher archive to search points to a time when the Internet was small and personal, and it can bring that feeling back in a small, carefully curated and distributed Gopher network. Retro can be fun.

This is exactly why I love Gopher.

I was born in the mid-90's. The first computer I can remember using ran Windows ME. My formative computing years were spent on Windows XP and Windows 7, chatting with my friends on AIM and occasionally breaking my computer by trying to dual boot Linux or OSX. The only programming language I used before I switched my major to computer science was TI-BASIC.

I feel like I missed the time period where computers and computer programs were simple enough to actually understand them, instead of just having a good enough approximation in your head. When the internet was available but not yet mainstream. Before everything became so commercialized and homogenized.

I know that the time periods I missed out on weren't actually as awesome as I think they were. I'm sure I would feel differently had I actually lived in them, but there's this sort of nostalgia for a time period that I never experienced that I feel about a lot of things. As far as I know, there's no word for that feeling but vaporwave music is a pretty good example of it.

Things like Gopher help me satisfy that feeling. There's no logical reason for me to use it over http and there's hardly anything available on Gopher nowadays but it makes me feel good in the same way that using a linux terminal and vim instead of an IDE makes me feel good, listening to a cassette tape makes me feel good, and watching War Games makes me feel good.

Try to identify the opportunities to catch a similar wave today. AI is in a similar place

I'm from that 'golden age' of computing and it was special. I was a child in the 70's and a teen in the 80's and it felt like a new frontier. Even at University in the late 80's and early 90's we knew we were unique as the generation that grew up with computers and saw each stage build on the next. We've gained so much, yet I too still miss the the simplicity and challenge of lesser systems.

Floodgap admin here. Always love these articles, but I think I'll need to watch the load average today. :-)

The article mentioned the various Firefox addons available. I'm trying to get native client functionality back into Firefox despite Web Extensions so we don't have to rely on proxies. This requires some unfortunate skulduggery with installing a native component because no native TCP sockets in WX, but it does work. That experiment is OverbiteNX: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/overbitenx/

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