> 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.