Gopher: Underground Technology (2004)

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71 points·ecliptik··8 comments

As Alberti said, "licensing killed gopher": https://mncomputinghistory.com/gopher-protocol/

The WWW was given for free, gopher tried to tax the world after being given away in a what looked like a bait-and-switch. Once the tax attempt happened, gopher never had a chance, it was simply unsafe to use. And really, the WWW was better anyway - it was far more flexible.

In theory, people could have served HTML over Gopher with inline images and everything else, but it's true the Gopher model was based around text documents with distinct menu pages as opposed to marked-up documents with links in them.

And images, the WWW supported images, gopher was about text. In my head porn helped kill gopher.

Gohper absolutely supports images. Basic browsers let you click a link to view it. More modern ones would inline the images.

Gopher is different from the WWW as it's expected your browser to render content in a way you want as opposed to a standard of how each page should look.

If you want to know where Port-A-Goph went:

http://oldvcr.blogspot.com/2022/05/gopher-on-palm-pilot-and-...

I made solitaire for gopher: https://cosmicrealms.com/blog/2019/06/14/solitaire-over-goph...

Why? Dunno. It was a fun weekend project.

Try to find the source in your linked GitHub. Just wonder what a gopher site look like. Can’t be javascript :-).

Btw one of the memory of gopher is 2 way links. Is that a must ?

I used gopher for a number of years, mostly as a hobby. Here is a proxy server if you want to look around: https://gopher.floodgap.com/gopher/gw

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