Gopher, did you hear that word?

Gopher

"To Gopher, the world is just one big file system"

Gopher - one of the protocols of the Internet, was popular in the early 1990s, subsequently its role decreased. Mainly with the ubiquitous development of WWW. It is mistaken (it is written in Russian and English wikipedia) that the Gopher and HTTP protocols were a kind of competitors, which led to a decrease in the share of one and an increase in the other. No, Gopher was originally developed for a kind of replacement for FTP , a protocol that was developed in the 1960s.

In one of the documents found on the scanty open spaces of the Gopher part of the Internet it is written:
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Free translation of a short excerpt from the gopher file: //hal3000.cx/0/Begin_Here/About_Gopher.txt

What FTP is capable of doing, Gopher does better. It not only allows you to distribute files, but also makes them easy to organize. With Gopher, you can not only arrange files in a user-friendly manner, but also add useful descriptions or comments that will accompany them. In addition, users no longer need to log in to the server to download the file, you can simply add a hyperlink to the server containing the necessary files.

Modern users find it difficult to understand the problems then facing their contemporaries. WWW at that time was only in the bud, to distribute information, and most importantly, to bind it together was a big problem. People had to rush between mailing lists, conferences, remote FTP servers. It was to facilitate the dissemination and binding of information that Gopher was introduced:

A free translation of the beginning of the developers' letter , where they submitted this project on October 8, 1991, 00:33

The Internet Protocol Gopher is designed to create a distributed system for obtaining information.

Gopher consists of a hyperlinked menu system. Links can lead to other servers. Going to the "page" we can observe the menu with directories and files, as well as links to other "pages". This is somewhat similar to how, for example, Firefox, shows a list of files and directories if we point it to the path on the local disk.

The 70th port was assigned to the protocol. The protocol is so simple that it can be used without a client at all (using telnet ). By the way, it was through telnet that I managed to watch utf-8 files in Russian. Other customers did not want to do this.

At the moment, few people have heard about Gopher, and the “after Chernobyl” generation has bypassed this stage of network development. I do not want to say that the protocol is undeservedly forgotten (today the number of functioning Gopher servers is measured in the hundreds, or to be more precise, 133), it does not fit the modern understanding of the network at all. WWW / HTTP covers the issue of distribution / access to information distributed across a network, overgrown with many features and related technologies, so that attempts to breathe life into Gopher are not even foreseen.
I hope someone was interested to know what "such" was.

For those who would like to touch the history, we can say that from modern browsers, only Firefox has the ability to view Gopher resources. Initially, such support was in IE to versions 5 and 6. In versions 5 and 6, support was removed by one of the updates that closed the security hole related to Gopher processing, a good method for dealing with holes, I wonder if they will remove HTTP support if a similar problem will be found :) Another way to browse is the console browser Lynx , which was originally developed for this purpose!





In order to look at all this live, I will provide a set of links (see FF, Lynx, telnet, or another Gopher browser):
Habraparser incorrigibly correct links. Just click on the gopher links is not necessary, it is better to copy them with your hands.
Interesting information about the protocol itself: gopher: //gopher.quux.org/1/Software/Gopher
Statistics Gopher search engine: gopher: //gopher.floodgap.com/0/v2/vstat
English Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_(protocol)
Russian Wikipedia: http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_ ( network_protocol)
Gopher server in Python: gopher: //gopher.quux.org/1/devel/gopher/pygopherd - I even put it, it works)

And also on the pages of Gopher, the essence is that they contain only information, no decorative garbage. Usability dream. On this thought, I’ll push the look of the site of Jacob Nielsen , the modern look of which could be successfully replaced by Gopher.

This technology was popular at the beginning of the mass distribution of the Internet. Who knows, if it were not for Tim , maybe this article would be posted on Gpher Habrahabr ...