Gopher!

This was a blast from the past! A trip down memory lane! Over at TidBits they have published an article on Gopher… I hadn’t seen anything published about ‘Gopher’ since, well, the mid ’90s? And I hadn’t been down a ‘Gopher hole’, since about ‘95. I thought it was long gone, how wrong I was.

So, what was (or should that be is?) Gopher? Well, back in the early ’90s, before the invention of web-browsers (the first one I used was called Mosaic, although I seem to remember using a slightly earlier text-based browser as well) and the ‘world-wide-web’ there was ‘Gopher space’. Basically, the way you got around the internet was via ‘Gopher holes’, you would login to a Gopher server, and you would be presented with a series of ‘folders’ on which you could click to access a Gopher server at another university (I never came across a Gopher at a company) or institution, or files stored on the current Gopher server. There was even ’search engines’, WAIS (Wide Area Information Servers) and Veronica.

It was a great way to get around the ‘net and find information.

I thought Gopher space was dead, having effectively been killed off by the world-wide-web, but no, it is still out there and can be accessed using Firefox. And to get you started, here is a Gopher link: TidBits (remember, use FIREFOX when clicking on this link), yep, TidBits in Gopher space.

The full TidBits article which started me off on this trip down memory lane can be found at: Down the Gopher Hole