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The Rise and Fall of the Gopher Protocol

posted by n1 on Saturday August 13 2016, @06:47AM   Printer-friendly
from the what-could-have-been dept.

canopic jug writes:

Right before HTTP took off in the early 1990's, there was Gopher and for a while it, too, was growing exponentially. It was fast and hosted text, source code, graphics, and any number of other types of files, just not all mixed together in one and the same document. For a while it was winning out over HTTP and making grounds against FTP. But that changed eventually and the rest is history. The MinnPost goes a bit into the history of Gopher with the Rise and Fall of the Gopher Protocol.

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  • (Score: 2) by NCommander on Saturday August 13 2016, @01:35PM

    by NCommander (2) Subscriber Badge <michael@casadevall.pro> on Saturday August 13 2016, @01:35PM (#387481) Homepage Journal

    I always had a love for the gopher protocol and the way it always was absurdly fast. I actually wrote part of a gopher interface to SN in rehash to the point it could render the main page, but never got farther than that mostly due to time, but for a brief period, gopher://dev.soylentnewns.org [soylentnewns.org] existed. Maybe one of these days I'll actually finish it.

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  • (Score: 2) by Scruffy Beard 2 on Saturday August 13 2016, @03:10PM

    by Scruffy Beard 2 (6030) on Saturday August 13 2016, @03:10PM (#387509)

    When I was shopping for web-hosts, I was disheartened by the number that appeared to ban gopher.

    Of course the cheap ones mandating a "normal website" probably don't support it anyway.

    Every major browser has now dropped support. Lynx still works.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 13 2016, @07:22PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 13 2016, @07:22PM (#387588)

      You don't want web hosting for gopher, fool. You want VPS hosting, then you can do whatever.

    • (Score: 3, Informative) by NCommander on Saturday August 13 2016, @07:29PM

      by NCommander (2) Subscriber Badge <michael@casadevall.pro> on Saturday August 13 2016, @07:29PM (#387591) Homepage Journal

      SDF [sdf.org] offers gopher hosting. I believe you can run mkgopher as a free account. Here's the tutorial doc [sdf.org]

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      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 13 2016, @08:01PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 13 2016, @08:01PM (#387606)

        create a directory in your $HOME called "gopher"

        OK.

        cd; mkdir gopher; php -S 0.0.0.0:7070 -t gopher/

        Oops.