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Bolkonskij Administrator 1024 MB Posts: 2023	on: January 21, 2023, 19:59 I've been spending much more time with my IIci lately and greatly enjoying it so far. The 8600 is awesome, but the Mac IIci is "awesomer" :-) Anyway, I've been exploring the GopherSpace quiet a bit lately and it's great to see there's still some action going on there. Even new Gopherspaces are being set up. So far I've been browsing the "latest additions to gopherspace" list on gopher://floodgap.com and found some interesting stuff here and there. Spent a long time today reading up on encw's gopherhole's posts regarding the modern web / tech. He can be found at encw.xyz. Naturally, another great resource is gopherpedia.com - a gopher interface to Wikipedia! So today I read Wikipedia articles while being on System 6 on my Mac IIci
Last Edit: February 25, 2023, 08:27 by Bolkonskij
68040 512 MB Posts: 950 68k - thy kingdom come, thy will be done !	Reply #1 on: January 21, 2023, 20:22 Plz post whatever gopher holes you happen to come across.

Bolkonskij Administrator 1024 MB Posts: 2023	Reply #2 on: January 21, 2023, 20:27 That's the idea of this thread... please everybody chip in :-)

Bolkonskij Administrator 1024 MB Posts: 2023	Reply #3 on: January 22, 2023, 17:02 Since I'm on the IIci, here's two more from my bookmarks: telefisk.org Very Amiga / Commodorian, but has a nice collection of ACSII art and Dilbert comic stuff ftp.icm.edu.pl Linux nerdery

scouter 64 MB Posts: 81 Retired IT Administraor	Reply #4 on: February 07, 2023, 13:22 I am user a gopher Browser call Gophie on my mac book pro. here's a link https://gophie.org/

wove 1024 MB Posts: 1363	Reply #5 on: February 07, 2023, 19:50 I was using CyberDog this morning to surf Gopher Space. Cyberdog does gopher natively. I went to gopherpedia it loaded, but noted there were errors. I tried to search gopherpedia and I got the message, "This gopher server requires a gopher+ client." I have never heard of gopher+. Is there a classic Mac Gopher Client that does gopher+? The University of Minnesota gopher space does not require gopher+ and the University of Minnesota (go Golden Gophers, my grandkids go/went to school there!) is home of the gopher protocol. Is gopher+ some new fangled add on to gopher? I have never heard of it before.

scouter 64 MB Posts: 81 Retired IT Administraor	Reply #6 on: February 07, 2023, 20:14 to wove, the following is extracted form Gopherpedia. Gopher+ ========= Gopher+ is a forward compatible enhancement to the Gopher protocol. Gopher+ works by sending metadata between the client and the server. The enhancement was never widely adopted by Gopher servers. The client sends a tab followed by a +. A Gopher+ server will respond with a status line followed by the content the client requested. An item is marked as supporting Gopher+ in the Gopher directory listing by a tab + after the port (this is the case of some of the items in the example above). Other features of Gopher+ include: * Item attributes, which can include the items Administrator Last date of modification Different views of the file, like PostScript or plain text, or different languages Abstract, or description of the item * Interactive queries

ovalking 128 MB Posts: 199	Reply #7 on: February 07, 2023, 20:20 Note that gopher://gopherpedia.com/ seems to work very nicely with Netscape 4.8. Thanks for highlighting this site - gonna be useful...f

wove 1024 MB Posts: 1363	Reply #8 on: February 08, 2023, 04:12 Digging into Gopher+ it seems the extension to the gopher protocol is from 2012, long after Cyberdog and the Classic Mac era. There is only one server package I could find that supports gopher+. So I guess we know what server software gopherpedia uses. It appears that it was an attempt to try and make it competitive with web browsers. It allows for image display and also supports tls security. It also allow for the exchange of metadata between client and server. It would seem that nothing done for the web after 1995 could be made that did not include spying capabilities. I had dial up to a unix machine in the early 90s. I dialed in on a Mac SE running System 6.0.5 using the communications module in ClarisWorks 3. Gopher was just a wonderful thing. The web we deal with today is just pathetic compared to how useful it once was.

Bolkonskij Administrator 1024 MB Posts: 2023	Reply #9 on: February 25, 2023, 08:26 So @Knezzen and me were talking about setting up a gopherspace for System 7 Today as well. Gopher has seen some small but incremental increase in activity in the past few years: Quote #In March 2017 Veronica indexed 133 gopher servers. # In May 2018 Veronica indexed 260 gopher servers. # In May 2019 Veronica indexed 320 gopher servers. # In January 2020 Veronica indexed 395 gopher servers. # In February 2021 Veronica indexed 361 gopher servers. That's not big but it sure saw some good growth between 2017 and 2021. What do you think we should offer on Gopher? One idea was to offer all our Updates as a quick and easy way to download them onto your System 7 Mac. What else do you deem useful? Also, if you have no prior experience with Gopher, Floodgap wrote a really nice introduction to Gopher: Quote Welcome to Gopherspace! With one click of your browser you've just taken several years back in Internet time. Close your eyes and grip your terminal. Imagine there's no Websites (it's easy if you try). Imagine that there's a Commodore 64 on your desk, or maybe a 386. Now open them again. You're in the year 1991, when University of Minnesota computer scientists, fed up with the limitations of FTP for downloading files and the overhead of having to log into computers for everything, decided to come up with a friendlier method of accessing data over the then largely vacant and much smaller Internet. The result was Gopher, a simple and easy to understand menu system that allowed once hideously complicated systems and services to be strung together for straightforward usage. And Gopher Was Good. In fact, Gopher was so good that for several years, Gopher sites sprang up all over. You could get weather reports on Gopher, news, mailing lists, even software. Then Mosaic came out barely a year or so later and plunged the world into darkness and all seemed lost under the choking strands of the World Wide Web. And Gopherspace lay all but forgotten. But Gopher's still out there. And what's more, you'll find it surprisingly useful, even years after the Web became a household word. Why? * It's easy to set up. * It's easy to write content for and facilitates organization. * It doesn't need much system power to run -- either from the server or from your computer. It can run on systems with little CPU power or memory. * It supports many things that the Web does, even if it looks less attractive. You can still view images, search and download programs, and ... * ... since Gopher has less data to transfer, it's frequently faster. Save the Gopher! Explore Gopherspace with Veronica-2 and find out about the hidden world the Gophers once dug. And think how different the world would be if that darn Mosaic had never been written ... :-)
Last Edit: February 25, 2023, 08:30 by Bolkonskij
wove 1024 MB Posts: 1363	Reply #10 on: February 25, 2023, 13:26 Gopher space for me always felt most suited to documentation. Overall there is lots of documentation for Classic Macs and Classic Mac OSes that is scattered and often hard to locate. Centralizing that information into an indexed system would be very useful. It is also a fine space for tutorials. @68040 just posted an excellent configuration setup for old email clients, stunned, and modern mail servers which would be a nice fit into a well indexed gopher space. Following along the lines of MacTracker, a space could be made tieing together machines, specification, manuals and suitable software. I think it is important to keep items focused on solid facts; avoid straying into the land of what is the "best word processor" It would be nice to engage the broader community. Perhaps the developers behind BlueSCSI would like to provided their specs and setup instructions. With talk of BBSes it would be handy to have material on terminal types and how they work. What is the differences between VT102 and ANSI terminals? I would think it best to start with a simple small coherent structure, encourage participation and engagement, and let the space grow somewhat organically, with perhaps some light moderation.

mac-cellar 128 MB Posts: 176 Gotta love System 7	Reply #11 on: February 26, 2023, 06:28 I like both of the ideas above... a Gopher Updates repository would be very useful, and a Documentation clearinghouse is also interesting.

Bolkonskij Administrator 1024 MB Posts: 2023	Reply #12 on: February 26, 2023, 07:29 Thanks for the suggestion, wove. Good thoughts we'll definitely consider. Thanks to its nature, Gopher is indeed a great medium for transporting information in a very compact way. Of course, the challenge is to do that while still keeping things well arranged. I feel just dumping stuff on the thing won't do. Let's see what this thing will evolve to. Knezzen and me continue to welcome any suggestions :-)

wove 1024 MB Posts: 1363	Reply #13 on: February 26, 2023, 14:28 I may misunderstand as I so often do, but I have thought of gopher spaces as being organized much like a course syllabus to a educational text book. I think that starting with an outline, perhaps using "More". Starting with a top level and breaking down the components, into lower levels. As levels develop drill down perhaps encourage volunteers to begin fleshing out the level or finding and organizing content for that level. @68040 is a writer and no doubt has insights into how one goes about organizing and revealing information in an engaging way for the reader. In terms of inspiration many of the projects on gitub have an excellent organizational structure that can be found as part of the project itself. Online learning platforms generally have imposed a solid structure on information. One of the nice features we have with the system 7 era browsers is that many of them understand gopher as well as www. So if it is convenient to have a www link in gopher content, our old browser would be able to seamlessly open a new page with content from another protocol.

Knezzen Administrator 512 MB Posts: 608 Village idiot	Reply #14 on: February 27, 2023, 12:01 Check out our gopher space and how it’s moving along. If anyone has any contributions to make, we’ll gladly accept them Point your Gopher clients to gopher://gopher.system7today.com

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