Mine the Harvest

Wanting to feel a bit nostalgic I decided to fire up Gopher and see if there were still any Gopher servers running out there. Back in the days before the Web had yet to be consolidated from the spinning mass of the proto-planetary internet mass, Gopher was one of the Gems of the Net. Using it you could seamlessly glide from server to server in a more or less hierarchical directory structure. No longer did you have to telnet to individual servers, you could just hop around. This was how surfing really started. Often you really had no idea where you where. And Gopher also allowed you to search – holy crap, this was hot stuff.

Sure – today I could just find a gopher server on Google and connect with Firefox to something like gopher://quux.org/ but this misses the point really as Gopher pre-dated browsers. Hardly nostalgic enough for a purist.

No problem – I’ll just install a gopher client on one of my Linux boxes and use it. Humm, they don’t have one installed by default anymore. Oh well – I can just install it from the repos. Oops, it’s not in the Base, Extras or RPMForge Repos for CentOS. Wow, seriously? Okay, I will just get the rpm for one real quick. Humm – that is not too easy either, dependencies blah blah. Oh – here is one for Debian, I guess I could make it into a RPM with Alien – oh why bother, it is so tiny I will just compile it locally.

So, here you go – just grab the source tarball and follow the mantra: configure and then make and make install and BAM! Welcome to the internet, circa 1991.

Now you can run your cutting edge gopher client – just run gopher, or connect to a specific gopher server like gopher quux.org and be amazed.

I used to connect to the internet through Colorado Supernet, which was started as a project by the Colorado School of Mines. They provided dial up SLIP accounts to residents in the remote mountain community where I lived. You did not even need be a college student. This was pretty much revolutionary for the time. I could connect to the actual internet while it was still an infant.

Armed with this new access I immediately purchased a very early copy of The Internet Yellowpages – yep, an actual printed directory of some of the hottest places to visit be it by telnet or gopher and listing guest login credentials if other than anonymous. (And a few even had web sites too, oh my!) Hours of entertainment ensued.

Ah, those were the days – logging in anonymously to NSF and NASA systems. Once I was able to access a USGS satellites after navigating through a lot of JPL systems. Thank you for that JPL, what a wonderful time.

My, how times have changed.

But I do wonder what may still be sitting out here in Gopher Space.