Remembering gopher

By Cory Doctorow at 2:56 am Monday, Apr 12

Lore "Brunching Shuttlecocks" Sjöberg has turned in a lyrical reminiscence about the glory days of gopher, the Web's predecessor. My first net-job (after the CDROM crash in the early 90s) was as a commerical gopher developer, and it turns out that were are lots of gopher sites still online:

Despite its relative obscurity, gopherspace is accessible to many more Web users than people realize. Gopher support is built into Mozilla-based browsers including Firefox, most versions of Netscape and Internet Explorer up to version 5, although the degree of support varies. People who want to stick with the familiarity of http can use the public gopher proxy at Floodgap.com, which translates gopher pages into HTML.

Visitors to gopherspace will find a piece of the Internet's history, some of which, Goerzen says, isn't available anywhere else. They will also find The Gopher Manifesto, a document praising gopher's simplicity and elegance.

The Gopher Manifesto describes gopher as "a hypertext Eden" that existed before the clutter and commercialization of the Web. "Is it time for a new Renaissance on the Internet, to bring back the promise of the early years?" it asks.

Link