What is Gopher?

info [Book]:The Net After dark

Ghoper s an attemp to wring order out of the primal chaos of ther internet.If your internet site or access provider has a gopher service,you can callit up and see a menu of internet offerings,by category. You pick a category and godeeper and deeper into the menu until you get to an actual online service.Gopher then connects you that service.If you are using gopher for file access,some gophers can download it to your desktop machine at the same time it is transferring it via ftp from the remote site.
Some will even perform any necessary decompression on the fly.The range of offerings on the net that are accessible through the gopher is called "gopherspace".

Gopher is possible because many of sites that offer gopher themselves put together a gopher menu of what they offer (if anything)and post it.
These menus are gathered and compiled by sort of super gopher at the University of Minnesota.

There are,at this writing,as many as six thousand participatinggopher site.Many the internet resources mentioned in this book can be found via gopher,but not at all,and your result will vary from day to day and site to site.

With one click of your browser you've just taken several years back in
Internet time. Close your eyes and grip your terminal. Imagine there's
no Websites (it's easy if you try). Imagine that there's a Commodore 64
on your desk, or maybe a 386.

Now open them again.

You're in the year 1991, when University of Minnesota computer scientists,
fed up with the limitations of FTP for downloading files and the overhead
of having to log into computers for everything, decided to come up with
a friendlier method of accessing data over the then largely vacant and
much smaller Internet. The result was Gopher, a simple and easy to
understand menu system that allowed once hideously complicated systems
and services to be strung together for straightforward usage. And Gopher
Was Good.

In fact, Gopher was so good that for several years, Gopher sites sprang up
all over. You could get weather reports on Gopher, news, mailing lists,
even software.

Then Mosaic came out barely a year or so later and plunged the world into
darkness and all seemed lost under the choking strands of the World Wide
Web. And Gopherspace lay all but forgotten.

But Gopher's still out there. And what's more, you'll find it surprisingly
useful, even years after the Web became a household word. Why?

* It's easy to set up.
* It's easy to write content for and facilitates organization.
* It doesn't need much system power to run -- either from the server or
from your computer. It can run on systems with little CPU power or memory.
* It supports many things that the Web does, even if it looks less attractive.
You can still view images, search and download programs, and ...
* ... since Gopher has less data to transfer, it's frequently faster.

Save the Gopher! Explore Gopherspace with Veronica-2 and find out about
the hidden world the Gophers once dug. And think how different the world would
be if that darn Mosaic had never been written ... :-)

Floodgap HELP: Using a web browser to access gopher space
updated 1 April 2009 (and without any joking around)

The majority of you are probably using a web browser to explore Gopherspace.
Happily, most web browsers will still understand Gopher, but they are at
best suboptimal. No major web browser understands Gopher+, for one thing.
Also, Internet Explorer should NOT be used at ALL! (I'll explain presently).

Still, they're the easiest way to access Gopherspace, so here's some help with
using them and deficiencies you need to be aware of.

LYNX

Lynx is probably the best browser for surfing both the Web and Gopherspace
in terms of its elegance. Text mode may be a limited oeuvre, but Lynx makes
it shine. It seamlessly shifts between both protocols without crufty helpers
or proxies, is fast and respectful to servers, dizzyingly configurable, and
interestingly is the only web browser that recognises GET gopher selectors as
web pages and automatically maps them into URLs. This is more exciting than
it sounds, trust me. :-) It also supports the gamut of Gopher features,
including search servers. The only thing it lacks is Gopher+ (oh, okay, and
images ;).

MOZILLA (FIREFOX, CAMINO, ICEWEASEL, SEAMONKEY, ... )

Most of you, alas, will find text to be a stifling environment even for gopher.
Fortunately, the Mozilla derivatives have significantly improved their gopher
support to the point where they are now THE CLIENT OF CHOICE if you want a
graphical system. This specifically includes Firefox 1.5.0.1 and up, and
Camino 1.0 and up (for Mac OS X). If you are not using either of these
browsers, please download and/or upgrade. Their support is up to that of the
previous non-Mozilla Netscape versions, including i itemtype, non-sorted menus
to preserve salient link order, and full access of indexed search servers.
Although not as smart about URLs as Lynx, and although they also lack Gopher+
support, both of these are relatively minor issues and the implementation is
otherwise more than adequate. Previous versions had only limited support or
no support at all, so do switch if you are not using one of these already.
Firefox 3/Mozilla 1.9 still currently support Gopher as of this writing.

MAKE IT EVEN BETTER WITH OVERBITE FF!

Despite its adequate baseline support, Mozilla does lack several useful
modern Gopher features with its current support (such as hURLs and CSO/ph
queries), and has only basic navigation and rendering. Also, Mozilla's built
in gopher renderer is limited to port 70.

Those of us in the Gopher community, including yours truly (disclaimer: I
am the primary programmer), have created an add-on for Firefox 2 and Firefox
3 with other browsers coming soon, that gives you additional Gopher support
and restores wider port access. It also has a skinnable interface and
better item type support. You can get it from

http://gopher.floodgap.com/overbite/

or

gopher://gopher.floodgap.com/1/overbite/

Again, let me stress that with their current support, for most users, Firefox
1.5.0.1 (and up), or Camino 1.0 (and up) for Mac OS X, ARE THE CLIENT(S) OF
CHOICE. If you don't want to use Lynx, use these. This also applies in general
to SeaMonkey, but these are the ones banged on the hardest and widest used.
It should also apply to other Mozilla derivatives (e.g., Iceweasel) assuming
that the support is not explicitly disabled.

Get Firefox (X11, Mac OS X, Windows): http://www.getfirefox.com/
Get Camino (Mac OS X): http://www.caminobrowser.org/

OMNIWEB

OmniWeb 5.9.2, released on 1 April 2009, adds Gopher support! Although there
are no icons, it fully renders i itemtype and supports most other item types,
and is NOT an April Fools joke! If you like Safari, then you should be using
OmniWeb for your Gopher/surfing needs, since it is built on the same core
(WebKit).

NETSCAPE

Pre-Mozilla Netscape (not the current codebase) is not spectacular but
certainly functional as a gopher client. Examining version 4.8's support,
it doesn't know how to understand Gopher+ but it's tolerant, and like
Lynx, supports the gamut of Gopher features. It properly (or at least
sensibly) formats gopher menus, accepts i itemtype, and doesn't try to
mess with selectors. It is also very quick, simple and painless to use.
While it isn't as seamless as Lynx, it gets the job done. Even though it is
aging rapidly in terms of its standards support, where gopher is concerned
it's a decent choice, and for older systems is probably still the best
all-around option for Web and gopher in a single application.

NCSA MOSAIC

NCSA Mosaic, all versions tested, supports Gopher, but does not properly
handle i itemtypes, which are used for displaying informational text;
instead, it renders them as links, which invariably fail when clicked on.
However, it is otherwise functional, and has most functions supported
except for Gopher+ (tested 1.x, 2.x and 3.x).

MICROSOFT INTERNET EXPLORER

And now, Internet Explorer. If you are using Internet Explorer 7, there is
NO MORE GOPHER SUPPORT (disabled at the WinINet level) -- you will need to
use a proxy (keep reading) or an external application.

Internet Explorer 6 can access gopher sites, but because of security bulletin
MS02-047, if patched up, Gopher support is DISABLED BY DEFAULT. -047 suggests
that this buffer overrun reported in the security advisory is corrected, but
disables Gopher in any case. This is nonsensical by any stretch of the
imagination. To reenable Gopher, you will need to insert a registry key;
either download the registry file from the clients directory here at Floodgap,
or go into RegEdit, drill down to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\
Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings, and enter a key named EnableGopher
with type DWord and value 00000001. The reg file is available from

gopher://gopher.floodgap.com/9/gopher/clients/ie6/iegopher.zip

It has been tested to work on Windows 98, Windows 2000 and Windows XP.
You may read Microsoft's brightly boneheaded corporate burble on why they
did that at

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/bulletin/MS02-047.asp

***If you're getting an error from IE about all gopher sites, resulting in
an inexplicable error message 'Cannot find server or DNS' which is totally
spurious (I get many complaints about floodgap's DNS, which is completely
functional, because of this completely inaccurate explanation), that's the
symptom of this error. Patch your IE, or better yet, ditch it for something
better like Firefox or Camino.***

Assuming you patched Internet Explorer 6 to reenable gopher support, or you
are still using Internet Explorer 4 or 5 for gopherspace, the news doesn't get
better: IE in any incarnation is miserable as a Gopher client. Because it
inherits the NCSA Mosaic codebase, it does not handle the i itemtype correctly,
which is used for displaying informational text, but that's just the least of
your worries. It does not allow access to TCP ports other than 70, which is a
VERY crippling limitation, and you can even outright *crash* IE 4 through 5
completely (and even Microsoft Web Proxy) by going to any gopher selector
that has a question mark '?' in it. This seems to have been repaired, finally,
in some versions of 5.0 but I still observe this bug from time to time.
There are also some reported problems with using itemtype 7 search servers,
such as Veronica-2, where some versions just hang.

Interestingly, this does not apply to Macintosh IE 5, which *doesn't* seem to
have any of these limitations other than the improper rendering of i itemtype.
Also, older versions of Internet Explorer, apparently v2.x and before, and
possibly v3.x, may not suffer from the problems that 4.x and 5.x do (quite
strange, as IE was allegedly based on Mosaic). Some users have reported that
the original webTV can also surf Gopherspace unfettered, since it's based on
an older version of IE; it appears very similarly to Netscape's presentation.
(I can't confirm this on my webTV emulator, but the functionality may be
disabled. Unfortunately, using an old IE makes your web experience suck even
worse.)

Regardless, IE is such a worthless web browser in just about every other
respect that I strongly suggest you jump to something like Firefox or
Camino -- a far faster, more secure and more capable browser -- than remaining
with IE for your web browsing tasks.

KONQUEROR

Konqueror, the KDE browser, doesn't seem to work at all out of the box.
Although it will connect, some screen shots I was kindly sent by a contributor
show that it only displays the first line sent by the server. Not much help.
This is from version 2.1.1.

However, enterprising users have come through for the Konqueror gopher
community and generated a kioslave that in my cursory evaluation seems to
cover just about all the basic tasks. I have been told by Konqueror users
that gopher support works very well with it installed, so if you'd like to
try it out, you can download kio_gopher from its home site at

http://kgopher.berlios.de/

It does not seem to support Gopher+, but supports all other features
accurately.

HYPERLINK (COMMODORE 64)

In the shameless plug department, HyperLink 2.5a and 2.5e for the Commodore
64 (disclosure: yours truly is the author) renders Gopherspace modeled on
Netscape, and does support indexed search servers. CSO searches are not
available in HL yet, however. i itemtype is supported. No Gopher+ yet.
See http://www.armory.com/%7Espectre/cwi/hl/

ARACHNE

The now-open source Arachne DOS web browser supports Gopher (tested on 1.70
and up) but also does not handle i itemtype correctly, giving them all links
and (inappropriate) content icons which makes navigation a little tricky. It
also does not properly support itemtype 7, meaning you cannot search sites
like Veronica-2 with it. If you are a DOS user, try Lynx for gopher instead.
The Arachne home page is

http://www.cisnet.com/glennmcc/

OPERA, SAFARI, ...

Of the remaining major browsers, neither Opera nor Apple Safari support
Gopher at all, and I am not aware of any other browsers other than the ones
mentioned above that do.

PROXY SUPPORT

So what do you do for browsers that utterly lack Gopher support at all? For
that case, use a proxy to do the conversion and spit out pre-rendered menus.
Besides the Public Proxy we offer here at http://gopher.floodgap.com/gopher/
open source also can help; a Squid developer has recently informed me that
Squid has gopher support built into it, modeled on Netscape 4.x's gopher
rendering. This is an excellent proxy server and should provide good
capabilities. Look for it in versions >=2.5. Again, user comments invited.

Please note that not all proxy servers are created equal; I am also informed
that Apache's proxy server does not support gopher at all (403 error).

THE BOTTOM LINE:

Serious exploration of Gopher still demands a more-than-basic client to get
the most out of the protocol, and we offer some here. Nevertheless, if you'd
like to go for an all-in-one browser solution, or if you're just playing
around and don't want to install something else, we strongly recommend using
Lynx, Firefox or Camino (current versions).

You can also check out a standards-based proxy that we offer at

http://gopher.floodgap.com/gopher/

if you cannot upgrade, or just want a taste of gopher; and if you use a
Mozilla-based browser, look at

http://gopher.floodgap.com/overbite/

or

gopher://gopher.floodgap.com/1/overbite/

Send your questions and your suggestions/test cases (particularly with
browsers we haven't mentioned here) to:

***

"Veronica",meanwhile,is a facility for perfoming keyword searches on gopher menu.
Veronica is a search engine system for the Gopher protocol, developed in 1992 by Steven Foster and Fred Barrie at the University of Nevada, Reno.
Veronica is a constantly updated database of the names of almost every menu item on thousands of Gopher servers. The Veronica database can be searched from most major Gopher menus.

The name, although officially an acronym for "Very Easy Rodent-Oriented Net-wide Index to Computer Archives", was chosen to match that of the FTP search service known as Archie — Veronica Lodge being the name of another character from the Archie Comics.