New life protocol Gopher

The only article on the Gopher protocol was published on Habré back in 2009, so I decided to refresh the topic a little.

Gopher ( Gopher - Eng.) - is the text precursor of the web, which went into oblivion back in 1993, when it was supplanted by a more functional HTTP. Over time, it was no longer supported by browsers, so when trying to navigate through gopher: //, some Firefox 32 links with regret that such a protocol is not supported. Until recently, my acquaintance with this artifact of the Internet was limited to a line from the book by A. Levin “Self-help manual on computer work (Windows 95/98)”: “... until now many interesting resources are available only on Gopher”. This was 14 years ago, although even then the protocol was completely abandoned.

But the gopher, though gone, but not quite. As is often the case with outdated technologies, Gopher has a few fans left - not as many as the legendary ZX Spectrum, but enough to support the community. As of 2013, there were 180 gopher servers, now there are even fewer. For comparison: in September 2014, the number of websites exceeded 1 billion. Can you join this small community? How? And most importantly - why? Let's try to figure it out.
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Wikipedia tells us that:

The gopher protocol has a more rigid information distribution structure, very similar to the directory structure in the file system, which consists of nested directories and files. The hierarchical structure of the links allowed text-terminal users, mainly in universities, to find the necessary information very quickly.

That is, judging by the description, Gopher is such an FTP with a text shell. And it is quite possible to place some text-only resource without modern effects , and even attach files. In practice, this is the case: the home page of a gopher site is a text document, each line in which is a link to a subdirectory, text document or another file.

You can raise your own server using a variety of server software, which is installed with a few clicks, and you can access the resource using one of the Gopher clients or browser plug-ins. Sometimes it seems that the amount of this software already exceeds the number of active sites. Due to the age of the subject, an old computer is quite suitable as a server machine, which used to gather dust in the storage room as unnecessary. Or favorite geeks Raspberry Pi .

My favorite bundle is the pygopherd python server and the client, which is actually called the Gopher Client . The graphical interface of the program will not allow you to fully experience the spirit of the text-based Internet without a mouse, but to surf with it is much more convenient. Speaking of surf: for Gopher, there is its own search engine “ Veronica-2 ”, covering about 65% of the current gofernet. “Veronica”, in particular, is implemented in the Gopher Client , so you will not need additional crutches.

Screenshot Gopher Client from the developer's site:


In the end, it is not forbidden to use the oldest text browser Lynx , which is still updated, and remained true to the protocol of 20 years ago.

Here is a short list of resources that still work:

gopher: //gopher.floodgap.com/ - (the largest resource on Gopher)
gopher: //gopher.quux.org/ - (protocol manifest)
gopher: //gopher.rp.spb.su/ - Russian server (almost the only one)
gopher: //gopher.rp.spb.su: 70/1% 2fservers - and a list of all working servers (!) on it.