[detourdog]

The CIA World Factbook was one of the major sites to access for information using Gopher. I discovered it using Gopher and it was proof to me of the usefulness of Internet. I would cite it as a reason that someone might want to access the internet.

[xphos]

Can you add context on what Gopher is for the unknowning? I searched for it but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_(protocol) is the only seemingly relavent thing I found not sure if thats exactly what your refering too?

[runjake]

Gopher was a text-mode, menu-based, hypertext-based precursor to the World Wide Web. It's what we used before the Web and web browsers came along.

Here's a good image of your typical Gopher page: https://img.sysnettechsolutions.com/What-is-Gopher-Nedir-EN....

[cfmcdonald]

This video [0] shows someone using Gopher (and other common pre-web Internet tools) in the early 90s.

I used Gopher when I did a high school summer science camp at Indiana University in 1994. It was a really interesting time of transition when the graphical Web was just coming on-line with Mosaic, but most tools were still textual/command line (FTP, pine/elm email/Usenet clients, MUDs, etc.)

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DDV4zrex18o

[detourdog]

It predated the World Wide Web as a client for browsing. It was developed at the University of Minnesota and named for the School's mascot.

The client was not graphical. I felt like it was like swinging from vine to vine with each vine being a gopher site. Once one was on a site one could drill down a directory structure of published data. One would access an initial site by typing in it's IP address or domain name. One could then follow the gopher links until exhaustion or all the links on that site were visited.

There was a period of time before the WWW was graphical and I found gopher far superior for browsing. One had to download files and then view them locally using local tools.

One could even follow a gopher link to the WWW. The splash page had the slogan "Welcome to the World Wide Web there is no top or bottom". This could not be said of Gopher sites where each site had to be connected to directly and all the links on the site could be visited.

Once IP addressees became available to the public WWW browser became graphical. This made the Gopher less useful since it was stuck as terminal browser. The IP address made the machine one was browsing from addressable to every host on the internet. This made inline graphics more practical because they could be rendered in line while browsing.

[xphos]

Gosh that actually sounds a amazing I am always annoyed that I have to leave terminal so much to explore I can understand the common person being daunted by that but a terminal accessible browser client sounds lovely for a lot of use cases

[ecliptik]

Lynx supports gopher [0] and check out Bombadillo [1], it's a stripped down "small web" (gopher, gemini, finger) only terminal browser.

Gopher is sort of like Latin, it's a dead protocol, but is still useful.

0. https://lynx.invisible-island.net/lynx_help/lynx_url_support...

1. https://bombadillo.colorfield.space/

[SyneRyder]

For Gopher, I used to use a little terminal browser called Phetch:

https://github.com/xvxx/phetch

It's written in Golang and was last updated in 2022. There's a GIF on the Github page to give a feel of what Phetch & browsing Gopher in the terminal is like. I mostly use the Lagrange GUI client though, which is fantastic.

Gopher still exists. If you're starting out, you can get your own "gopherhole" and Unix shell account at https://sdf.org/ It's a long time since I updated mine, but I'm at gopher://sdf.org:70/1/users/syneryder/

[edsu]

This makes me wonder if someone is putting the latest version of the Factbook on Gopher now. It might be a fun little project?

PS. Lagrange is a beautiful piece of software.

[detourdog]

I kinda of remember when Mosaic supported all the protocols. One would just replace http with whatever protocol wanted to connect to the host with.

gopher:// or ftp://

[pseudalopex]

TUI web browsers exist. But many sites are not usable.

Gemini is a newer protocol influenced by Gopher.[1]

[1] https://geminiprotocol.net/

[detourdog]

I'm pretty nostalgic for Gopher. If the graphical web hadn't been so mind blowing I would have realized how great it was at the time. Before the web had graphical browser I thought it was pretty useless compared to gopher.

[mzi]

> Once IP addressees became available to the public WWW browser became graphical.

What does that even mean?

[detourdog]

There was a time when only institutions were on the internet. Eventually one could get dial-up connection to a commercial entity. NYC's had an early commercial service provided by PANIX (Public Access Unix) and the San Francisco bay area had the Well.

This was just a terminal connection where one could connect to other hosts on the internet through a dial-up connection. The modem would connect to a computer that had a route to an internet gateway. PANIX provided a Unix user account one could dial into. One didn't need an IP address to get on the internet. The difference was that an internet host couldn't find/connect to the terminal one was browsing on. There was no "addressability". If one downloaded a file from the internet it didn't end up on the machine one was using. The file ended up in a directory on the computer one was dialed into. The second step of retrieving the file involved downloading the file from your home directory on the Unix machine one was dialed into. In my case I think I needed a modem that supported the Zmodem protocol.

Eventual the dial-up providers were able to provide IP addresses using the SLIP (serial link IP). Once one had an IP the machine was on equal footing of all the other internet hosts. The computers could exchange information directly. This provided an easy way for a web browser to directly connect from the machine one was using and the host one was connected to. This is when graphical browser became available to everyone with an IP address. The graphics became inline and could be rendered directly on the client.

I believe there were ways prior to this to inline render graphics I never experienced them. AOL used to be a closed network with graphics and no internet gateway. CompuServe may have been similar. I never used either of those systems.

Outside of my college's library connection I only accessed the internet through PANIX until the internet boom. I learned about PANIX through an ad in the back of Computer Shopper.

[mzi]

Mosaic, the first graphical browser was developed by National Center for Supercomputing Applications. They were of course not bound by dial-up or similar and probably didn't care for commercial offerings of connectivity in their priorities in development.

And before it, slip had been available and standardized for some time.

I would say what drove the adoption of commercial services was the graphical web, not the other way around.

[detourdog]

I think the point I would want to make is the commercial availability of IP addresses drove the graphical browser adoption.

I read about graphical browsers in MacWeek in an article about SoundWire. This was a website that was selling music on the web. I believe fulfillment was through snailmail. There headquarters were in a Brooklyn apartment. I somehow contacted the owner (Joe a friend of Dang) and took the subway to his apartment to see a graphical browser in action. I don't know how long it took to actually get my own IP address but I know it took me a few days to get a MacPPP connection to actually work over slip.

[jimt1234]

I feel really old now. :(

[homebrewer]

Don't; I'm pretty old myself, and I've only a vague idea of what gopher is because it was never used in this part of the world, and internet access also came pretty late. Maybe GP is in a similar position.