Gopher (protocol)

This post from @Mobi: https://www.hpcfactor.com/forums/forums/thread-view.asp?tid=18523&po...
...got me interested in minimal resource information exchange, especially with old text browsers. I spent the last couple of days perusing 'gopher holes' and finally ended up installing a gopher server on my Ubuntu vm just to play around with 1990s tech.
I've been using Lynx to browse files in /var/gopher on localhost and displaying text files, gifs and playing .oggs from other sites. I'm still having a little trouble getting my gophermap working correctly but it's been a lot of fun on a rainy Winter day.
Anybody have any favorite Gopher sites?

Here's some good links to start with. I have an account at circumlunar.space. I highly recommend it. I've also set up an LXer mirror at gopher://gopher.visiblink.ca. Some days the web scraping script works and some days it doesn't. I'm using an old laptop with pygopherd as a server in a Debian virtual machine.

Gopher holes:
gopher://circumlunar.space
gopher://gopher.black
gopher://sdf.org
gopher://baud.baby/
gopher://gopher.floodgap.com/1/
gopher://gopher.leveck.us/1
gopher://bitreich.org/1


Phlog lists:
gopher://i-logout.cz/1/bongusta/list/
gopher://gopher.black/1/moku-pona


If you post your gophermap I might be able to help you with it, although I'm a complete amateur.

I also use slrn for browsing newsgroups and newsbeuter for rss feeds. You might be interested in those as well (and mocp for music while you're surfing!).

Edited by Mobi 2018-12-14 5:26 AM

Pretty interesting, I've only heard the Gopher name in passing but wasn't around when it was "a thing". Glad it's still in (somewhat) use. Here's an article I found interesting: https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/9kwek8/long-live-gopher-t... Has a couple of interesting links to Gopher sites, too.

Hi, I only know that Gopher existed, but I started my internet experience from Windows 95, in Microsoft Internet Explorer.
But I know a good book to discover many of the legacy protocols and tools:
The Whole Internet - User's Guide and Catalog from Oreilly.

I own a Japanese version of it, it makes me want to discover the whole network system with Lynx and etc!

Thanks for the replies, folks. Interesting links. @Mobi, running a server from a vm on a small laptop in your basement - impressive.

haha, you lot tickle me.

I was always an NNTP guy I'm afraid. You could convert the HPC:Factor Forum RSS feeds into a Gopher site

Hmm.... that's an idea....

I might give it a try with the tools available here: https://gopherproxy.meulie.net/sdf-eu.org/1/users/jacobh/rss

I forgot to include my own phlog's address. It's gopher://circumlunar.space:70/1/~visiblink/

For anyone who didn't notice the details in Mjolnir's post in the other thread, you can view gopher pages using Firefox with the OverbiteWX add on.

Edited by Mobi 2018-12-14 4:55 PM

@Mobi Browsing your 'Gopher hole' on a rainy Thursday afternoon using lynx browser running on Debian Sarge on my Jornada 820.





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This is your gopher site on displayed on my Macbook Pro using Lynxlet.






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Nice, I hadn't heard of Lyxlet.

Wow. It's kind of nice that there's still something you can browse with the Jornada. I used to use the 680 for browsing websites, but the emergence of SSL everywhere ended that.

Gopher's kind of interesting in the personal way that the web used to be ... lots of neat little sites.

It's a cold Saturday morning here, but I'm so happy to be off for Christmas now. Down time.

I didn't know about Lynxlet either. That's really cool. I wonder if there's a Mac version of PINE too?

My wife has a MacBook Pro, so I suppose that's my next laptop (she buys new, I recycle ), but when I take it over I'll wipe it and install Debian.

That gopher site has officially had two more visits than I expected!

Edited by Mobi 2018-12-22 2:15 PM

Since we're comparing gopher screenshots (what an odd pastime), here's a link to mine: https://i.imgur.com/q90fiMN.png


Edited by Mobi 2018-12-22 5:43 PM

Cold, wet and rainy this Monday morning so I thought I'd add a new wrinkle to our 'Gopher' thread. I installed lynx on my Win10 WSL (Windows Sub-system for Linux) install and visited your server this morning.





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20191216_1029_Modi_Gopher.jpg (87KB - 0 downloads)

I ran across this browsing Twitter: "Gopherus - a multi-platform, console-mode gopher client
Copyright (C) 2013-2022 Mateusz Viste

Gopherus is a free, multiplatform, console-mode gopher client that provides a classic text interface to the gopherspace. Gopherus is published under the '2-clause' BSD license." https://gopherus.sourceforge.net/