The Gopher protocol (pron.: /ˈɡoʊfər/) is a TCP/IP application layer protocol designed for distributing, searching, and retrieving documents over the Internet. Strongly oriented towards a menu-document design, the Gopher protocol presented an alternative to the World Wide Web in its early stages, but ultimately HTTP became the dominant protocol. The Gopher ecosystem is often regarded as the effective predecessor of the World Wide Web.
Invented by a team led by Mark P. McCahill at the University of Minnesota, the protocol offers some features not natively supported by the Web and imposes a much stronger hierarchy on information stored on it. Its text menu interface is easy to use,[1] and well-suited to computing environments that rely heavily on remote text-oriented computer terminals, which were still common at the time of its creation in 1991, and the simplicity of its protocol facilitated a wide variety of client implementations. More recent Gopher revisions and graphical clients added support for multimedia.[1] Gopher was preferred by many network administrators for using fewer network resources than Web services.[2]
With its hierarchical structure, Gopher provided a useful platform for the first large-scale electronic library connections.[3] Gopher users remember the system as being "faster and more efficient and so much more organised" than today's Web services.[4] Although largely supplanted by the Web in the years following, the Gopher protocol is still in use by enthusiasts, and a small population of actively maintained servers remains.
Origins
The original Gopher system was released in late spring of 1991 by Mark McCahill, Farhad Anklesaria, Paul Lindner, Daniel Torrey, and Bob Alberti of the University of Minnesota.[5] Its central goals were, as stated in RFC 1436:
- A file-like hierarchical arrangement that would be familiar to users.
- A simple syntax.
- A system that can be created quickly and inexpensively.
- Extending the file system metaphor, such as searches.
Gopher combines document hierarchies with collections of services, including WAIS, the Archie and Veronica search engines, and gateways to other information systems such as FTP and Usenet.
The general interest in Campus-Wide Information Systems (CWISs)[6] in higher education at the time, and the ease with which a Gopher server could be set up to create an instant CWIS with links to other sites' online directories and resources were the factors contributing to Gopher's rapid adoption. By 1992, the standard method of locating someone's e-mail address was to find their organization's CCSO nameserver entry in Gopher, and query the nameserver.[7]
The name was coined by Anklesaria[8] as a play off of several meanings of the word "gopher." The University of Minnesota mascot is the gopher,[9] a gofer (same sound) is an assistant who "goes for" things, and a gopher burrows through the ground to reach a desired location.
A New User Experience
Contemporary accounts [10] offer a glimpse of what using Gopher was like when the program burst onto the scene, unified several resources, and created "Gopher space".
On a screen with 25 lines of 80 green characters each (no graphics then, long since remedied) you got a series of hierarchical menus. The top level menu might be all the departments and publications (e.g., the campus newspaper) of your university, which had invested in running a Gopher server as a way of delivering documents electronically, at least to the local community.
There were no search engines as we know them today. Available information was presented in a series of nested menus, intended to resemble a hierarchical file system of folders, something familiar to computer users who saw any search for information as trying to find that particular file (document) which held a particular answer.
If you wanted recent news for the women's volleyball team, you would go to the "Daily Crimson Newspaper" menu item and choose the "Word Search of Latest Month" item. When asked to enter a search string, you would enter the word "volleyball." All articles in the local Daily Crimson newspaper from the last month that contained the word "volleyball" would be listed as a separate menu. You could select which one to get first. In part for lack of bandwidth, the system's presentation was intended to appear as listings of files, without their content. There were no paragraphs from inside the "hits", each with the word "volleyball" in boldface type.
And if you don't know what the newspaper is called or even if it is available? Searching a top level menu called "Keyword Search of [all] Gopher Menus" with a keyword "daily" would get you into the Daily Crimson publication you wanted for your "volleyball" search.
Note that this core Gopher functionality searches one publication in one location only (the campus newspaper at a local university). Nevertheless, the system was robust and its power soon grew. The sys admins setting up any local Gopher server had freedom to change menu hierarchies and names independently of the underlying file systems. What enabled Gopher to give so many who worked with it a foretaste of the World Wide Web yet to come was the ability to add links to other Gopher servers around the world. Now users could hop from one server to another in "Gopher space" (the first "cloud") without thinking about a single underlying network address.
True, to actually get the text you wanted, you had to click on several links, and read through a menu each time before you choose another link. Yet that worked more rapidly than people might think today, and in the heyday of Gopher, much time was spent choosing and organizing links in layouts that could be grasped at a glance. Gopher became the text-handling, document-delivery system it was intended to be. A user could display a text document on her screen, save it to a file, print it out, or even e-mail a copy to another person on the Internet. Gopher became the dominant client for other information services: Wide Area Information Servers (WAIS), FTP, and Archie, a database of the files held by most of the major anonymous (public) FTP sites on the Internet. Initially, Gopher could search only one WAIS database at a time, and WAIS's "relevance feedback" tool (find content-similar documents) was not available.
The World Wide Web added graphics to text, but lost the menus. It took a while for increased power in communication, storage and computation -- bandwidth a thousand times broader (9600 baud MODEM to fiber optics), arrays of disk drives each a thousand times larger (under 1 GB to over 1 TB) and cheap servers (PC CPUs a thousand times faster) -- to permit us to regularly crawl the Web and catalog it for search engines. While Gopher's menu system seems quaint, we should remember the time between the decline in Gopher usage and the arrival of search engine ascendency. Back then, early World Wide Web users looked eagerly for lists of links ("my favorite links" pages), and users were anxious to bookmark good links that they might never find again. Without structured menus, users had taken a step backwards, but, with less structure, something with more generality and much greater power emerged by the dawn of the 21st century: the World Wide Web.
Stagnation
The World Wide Web was in its infancy in 1991, and Gopher services quickly became established. By the late 1990s, Gopher had largely ceased expanding. Several factors contributed to Gopher's stagnation:
- In February 1993, the University of Minnesota announced that it would charge licensing fees for the use of its implementation of the Gopher server.[11] As a consequence of this, some users were concerned that a licensing fee would also be charged for independent implementations.[12][13] Users were scared away from Gopher technology, to the advantage of the Web, which CERN disclaimed ownership of.[14] In September 2000, the University of Minnesota re-licensed its Gopher software under the GNU GPL.[15][16]
- Gopher client functionality was quickly duplicated by early Web browsers, such as Mosaic, which subsumed the protocol as part of their functions.
- Gopher has a more rigid structure compared to the free-form HTML of the Web. With Gopher, every document has a defined format and type, and the typical user navigates through a single server-defined menu system to get to a particular document. This can be quite different from the way a typical user might traverse documents on the Web.
Gopher remains in active use by its enthusiasts -- like Adam Curry and Dave Winer, the inventors of podcasting -- and there have been attempts to revive the use of Gopher on modern platforms and mobile devices. One such attempt is The Overbite Project, which hosts various browser extensions and modern clients.
As of 2012[update], there are approximately 160 gopher servers indexed by Veronica-2,[17] reflecting a slow growth from 2007 when there were fewer than 100,[18] although many are infrequently updated. Within these servers Veronica indexed approximately 2.5 million unique selectors. A handful of new servers are set up every year by hobbyists – over 50 have been set up and added to Floodgap's list since 1999.[19] A snapshot of Gopherspace as it was in 2007 was circulated on BitTorrent and is still available.[20] Due to the simplicity of the Gopher protocol, setting up new servers or adding Gopher support to browsers is often done in a tongue in cheek manner, principally on April Fools' Day.[21][22]
Native Gopher support
Browsers that do not natively support Gopher can still access servers using one of the available Gopher to HTTP gateways.
Gopher support was disabled in Internet Explorer versions 5.x and 6 for Windows in August 2002 by a patch meant to fix a security vulnerability in the browser's Gopher protocol handler to reduce the attack surface which was included in IE6 SP1; however, it can be re-enabled by editing the Windows registry. In Internet Explorer 7, Gopher support was removed on the WinINET level.[29]
Gopher browser plugins
For Mozilla Firefox and SeaMonkey, OverbiteFF extends Gopher browsing and supports Firefox 4. It includes support for accessing Gopher servers not on port 70 using a whitelist and for CSO/ph queries, and allows versions of Firefox and SeaMonkey that do not support Gopher natively to access Gopher servers. Plugins are also available for Konqueror[30] and a proxy-based extension for Google Chrome.[31]
Gopher clients for mobile devices
Some have suggested that the bandwidth-sparing simple interface of Gopher would be a good match for mobile phones and personal digital assistants (PDAs),[32] but so far, mobile adaptations of HTML and XML and other simplified content have proven more popular. The PyGopherd server provides a built-in WML front-end to Gopher sites served with it.
The early 2010s have seen a renewed interest in native Gopher clients for popular Smartphones. Overbite, an open source client for Android 1.5+ was released in alpha stage in 2010.[33] PocketGopher was also released in 2010, along with its source code, for several Java ME compatible devices. iGopher was released in 2011 as a proprietary client for iPhone and iPad devices.
Other Gopher clients
Gopher was at its height of popularity during a time when there were still many equally competing computer architectures and operating systems. As such, there are several Gopher clients available for Acorn RISC OS, AmigaOS, Atari MiNT, CMS, DOS, classic Mac OS, MVS, NeXT, OS/2 Warp, most UNIX-like operating systems, VMS, Windows 3.x, and Windows 9x. GopherVR was a client designed for 3D visualization, and there is even a Gopher client MOO object. The majority of these clients are hard coded to work on TCP port 70.
Gopher to HTTP gateways
Users of Web browsers that have incomplete or no support for Gopher can access content on Gopher servers via a server gateway or proxy server that converts Gopher menus into HTML; known proxies are the Floodgap Public Gopher proxy, Gopher Proxy, and the WikkaGopher proxy. Similarly, certain server packages such as GN and PyGopherd have built-in Gopher to HTTP interfaces. Squid Proxy software gateways any gopher:// URL to HTTP content, enabling any browser or web agent to access gopher content easily.
Technical details
The conceptualization of knowledge in "Gopher space" or a "cloud" as specific information in a particular file, and the prominence of the FTP, influenced the technology and the resulting functionality of Gopher.
Gopher characteristics
As part of its design goals, Gopher functions and appears much like a mountable read-only global network file system (and software, such as gopherfs, is available that can actually mount a Gopher server as a FUSE resource). At a minimum, whatever a person can do with data files on a CD-ROM, they can do on Gopher.
A Gopher system consists of a series of hierarchical hyperlinkable menus. The choice of menu items and titles is controlled by the administrator of the server.
 | |  |
The top level menu of a Gopher server. Selecting the "Fun and Games" menu item... | | ...takes the user to the "Fun and Games" menu. |
Similar to a file on a Web server, a file on a Gopher server can be linked to as a menu item from any other Gopher server. Many servers take advantage of this inter-server linking to provide a directory of other servers that the user can access.
Protocol
The Gopher protocol was first described in RFC 1436. IANA has assigned TCP port 70 to the Gopher protocol.
The protocol is simple to negotiate, making it possible to browse without using a client. A standard gopher session may therefore appear as follows:
/Reference1CIA World Factbook /Archives/mirrors/textfiles.com/polit ics/CIA gopher.quux.org 700Jargon 4.2.0 /Reference/Jargon 4.2.0 gopher.quux.org 70 +1Online Libraries /Reference/Online Libraries gopher.quux.org 70 +1RFCs: Internet Standards /Computers/Standards and Specs/RFC gopher.quux.org 701U.S. Gazetteer /Reference/U.S. Gazetteer gopher.quux.org 70 +iThis file contains information on United States fake (NULL) 0icities, counties, and geographical areas. It has fake (NULL) 0ilatitude/longitude, population, land and water area, fake (NULL) 0iand ZIP codes. fake (NULL) 0i fake (NULL) 0iTo search for a city, enter the city's name. To search fake (NULL) 0ifor a county, use the name plus County -- for instance, fake (NULL) 0iDallas County. fake (NULL) 0
Here, the client has established a TCP connection with the server on port 70, the standard gopher port. The client then sends a string followed by a carriage return followed by a line feed (a "CR + LF" sequence). This is the selector, which identifies the document to be retrieved. If the item selector were an empty line, the default directory would be selected. The server then replies with the requested item and closes the connection. According to the protocol, before the connection is closed, the server should send a full-stop (i.e., a period character) on a line by itself. However, as is the case here, not all servers conform to this part of the protocol and the server may close the connection without returning the final full-stop.
In this example, the item sent back is a gopher menu, a directory consisting of a sequence of lines each of which describes an item that can be retrieved. Most clients will display these as hypertext links, and so allow the user to navigate through gopherspace by following the links.[5]
All lines in a gopher menu are terminated by "CR + LF", and consist of five fields: the item type as the very first character (see below), the display string (i.e., the description text to display), a selector (i.e., a file-system pathname), host name (i.e., the domain name of the server on which the item resides), and port (i.e., the port number used by that server). The item type and display string are joined without a space; the other fields are separated by the tab character.
Because of the simplicity of the Gopher protocol, tools such as netcat make it possible to download Gopher content easily from the command line:
echo jacks/jack.exe | nc gopher.example.org 70 > jack.exe
The protocol is also supported by cURL as of 7.21.2-DEV.[34]
Gopher item types
Item types are described in gopher menus by a single number or (case specific) letter and act as hints to the client to tell it how to handle a specific media type in a menu, analogous to a MIME type. Every client necessarily must understand itemtypes 0 and 1. All known clients understand item types 0 through 9, g, and s, and all but the very oldest also understand file-types h and i.
A list of additional file-type definitions has continued to evolve over time, with some clients supporting them and others not. As such, many servers assign the generic 9 to every binary file, hoping that the client's computer will be able to correctly process the file.
URL links
Historically, to create a link to a Web server, "GET /" was used as a pseudo-selector to simulate an HTTP client request. John Goerzen created an addition[35] to the Gopher protocol, commonly referred to as "URL links", that allows links to any protocol that supports URLs. For example, to create a link to http://gopher.quux.org/, the item type is "h", the display string is the title of the link, the item selector is "URL:http://gopher.quux.org/", and the domain and port are that of the originating Gopher server (so that clients that do not support URL links will query the server and receive an HTML redirection page).
Related technology
The master Gopherspace search engine is Veronica. Veronica offers a keyword search of all the public Internet Gopher server menu titles. A Veronica search produces a menu of Gopher items, each of which is a direct pointer to a Gopher data source. Individual Gopher servers may also use localized search engines specific to their content such as Jughead and Jugtail.
GopherVR is a 3D virtual reality variant of the original Gopher system.
Gopher server software
Because the protocol is trivial to implement in a basic fashion, there are many server packages still available, and some are still maintained.
- gopherfs – a gopher filesystem FUSE abstraction
See also
- Veronica – the search engine system for the Gopher protocol, an acronym for "Very Easy Rodent-Oriented Net-wide Index to Computer Archives"
- Gopher+ – early proposed extensions to the Gopher protocol
- GopherVR
- Jugtail – an alternative search engine system for the Gopher protocol. Jugtail was formerly known as Jughead.
- SDF Public Access Unix System – a non-profit organization which provides free Gopher hosting
- Phlog – The gopher version of a weblog
- Wide area information server – a search engine whose popularity was contemporary with Gopher
References
- ^ a b "Medical Library Handbook". World Health Organization- Regional office for the Eastern Mediterranean. pp. 56–64. http://www.emro.who.int/lin/media/pdf /handbook_chap4_8.pdf.[dead link]
- ^ "How Moore's Law saved us from the Gopher web". 12 March 2009. http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/sho rtsharpscience/2009/03/how-moores-law -saved-the-web.html. Retrieved 20 September 2011.
- ^ Suzan D. McGinnis (2001). Electronic collection management. Routledge. pp. 69–72. ISBN 0-7890-1309-6. http://books.google.ca/books?id=A1UoH 2vGKE8C&pg=PA69.
- ^ Tomi T. Ahonen (2002). m-Profits: Making Money from 3G Services. Wiley. pp. 33–34. ISBN 0-470-84775-1. http://books.google.ca/books?id=bUJGe nHGNdQC&pg=PA33.
- ^ a b December, John; Randall, Neil (1994). The World Wide Web unleashed. Sams Publishing. p. 20. ISBN 1-57521-040-1.
- ^ "Google Groups archive of bit.listserv.cwis-l discussion". Google. http://groups.google.com/group/bit.li stserv.cwis-l/browse_frm/thread/11db6 89fbe802834/bc8a60ab89926a4b?lnk=st&a mp;q=cwis+gopher&rnum=482&hl= en#bc8a60ab89926a4b. Retrieved 27 July 2011.
- ^ "Google Groups archive of comp.infosystems.gopher discussion". Google. http://groups.google.com/group/comp.i nfosystems.gopher/browse_frm/thread/e ef4cfbdbc862afe/9cbc3e3690b8fb4e?lnk= st&q=%22cso+nameserver%22&rnu m=19&hl=en#9cbc3e3690b8fb4e. Retrieved 27 July 2011.
- ^ Mark McCahill, Farhad Anklesaria (in English) (Flash). "Smart Solutions: Internet Gopher". Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Media Mill. Event occurs at 2:40. http://mediamill.cla.umn.edu/mediamil l/display/69597. McCahill credits Anklesaria with naming Gopher
- ^ "Gophersports.com – Official Web Site of University of Minnesota Athletics". http://www.gophersports.com/. Retrieved 17 August 2010.
- ^ Ward, Lynn (Dec 1992-Jan 1993). "Exploring the Power of the Internet Gopher". UIUCnet 6 (1). http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~jac22/books/ www/refs/tools/veronica. Retrieved 5Dec2012.
- ^ University of Minnesota Gopher software licensing policy The Minnesota Gopher Team
- ^ JQ Johnson (25 February 1993). "Message from discussion gopher licensing". Google. http://groups.google.com/groups?selm= [email protected]. Retrieved 27 July 2011.
- ^ Joel Rubin (3 March 1999). "CW from the VOA server page – rec.radio.shortwave". Google. http://groups.google.com/groups?selm= [email protected] .com. Retrieved 27 July 2011.
- ^ Johan Söderberg (2007). Hacking Capitalism: The Free and Open Source Software Movement. Routledge. p. 25. ISBN 0-415-95543-2.
- ^ gopher://www.michaeleshun.4t.com
- ^ comp.infosystems.gopher: UMN Gopher(d) released under the GPL
- ^ gopher://gopher.floodgap.com/0/v2/vst at
- ^ Kaiser, Cameron (19 March 2007). "Down the Gopher Hole". TidBITS. http://db.tidbits.com/article/8909. Retrieved 23 March 2007.
- ^ gopher://gopher.floodgap.com/1/new
- ^ "Download A Piece of Internet History". The Changelog. 28 April 2010. http://changelog.complete.org/archive s/1466-download-a-piece-of-internet-h istory. Retrieved 27 July 2011.
- ^ "Release Notes – OmniWeb 5 – Products". The Omni Group. http://www.omnigroup.com/applications /omniweb/releasenotes/. Retrieved 27 July 2011.
- ^ gopher://gopher.floodgap.com/1/new "Service note for 1 April 2009—This isn't a joke server, guys, we've been running for 10 years!"
- ^ Fonseca, Jonas (24 December 2004). "elinks-users ANNOUNCE ELinks-0.10.0 (Thelma)". Linux from scratch. http://linuxfromscratch.org/pipermail /elinks-users/2004-December/000785.ht ml. Retrieved 22 May 2010.
- ^ hotaru.firefly, et al. (2 May 2009). "Issue 11345: gopher protocol doesn't work". Google. http://code.google.com/p/chromium/iss ues/detail?id=11345. Retrieved 25 July 2011.
- ^ "Microsoft Security Bulletin MS02-047". Microsoft. 28 February 2003. http://www.microsoft.com/technet/secu rity/bulletin/MS02-047.mspx. Retrieved 23 March 2007.
- ^ "Bug 388195 – Remove gopher protocol support for Firefox". https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug .cgi?id=388195. Retrieved 15 June 2010.
- ^ "OmniWeb 5.9.2 now includes Gopher support". OmniGroup. 1 April 2009. http://blog.omnigroup.com/2009/04/01/ for-immediate-release-omniweb-592-now -includes-gopher-support/. Retrieved 3 April 2009.
- ^ "A comprehensive list of changes for each version of OmniWeb". OmniGroup. 1 April 2009. http://www.omnigroup.com/applications /omniweb/releasenotes/. Retrieved 3 April 2009.
- ^ "Release Notes for Internet Explorer 7". Microsoft. 2006. http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/ie/a a740486.aspx. Retrieved 23 March 2007.
- ^ "kio_gopher – Gopher kioslave". http://kgopher.berlios.de/. Retrieved 21 August 2010.
- ^ "The Overbite Project". Floodgap. http://gopher.floodgap.com/overbite/. Retrieved 25 July 2010.
- ^ Lore Sjöberg (12 April 2004). "Gopher: Underground Technology". Wired News. http://www.wired.com/news/technology/ 0,1282,62988,00.html. Retrieved 27 July 2011.
- ^ Paul, Ryan (6 July 2010). "Overbite Project brings Gopher protocol to Android". Ars Technica. http://arstechnica.com/open-source/ne ws/2010/07/overbite-project-brings-go pher-protocol-to-android.ars?utm_sour ce=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_cam paign=rss. Retrieved 25 July 2010.
- ^ "Curl: Re: Gopher patches for cURL (includes test suite)". http://curl.haxx.se/mail/lib-2010-08/ 0339.html. Retrieved 25 August 2010.
- ^ Goerzen, John. (gopher) Links to URL.
External links
Standards
- IANA Port Number allocations
- RFC 1436 – The Internet Gopher Protocol (a distributed document search and retrieval protocol)
- RFC 1580 – Guide to Network Resource Tools
- RFC 1689 – Networked Information Retrieval: Tools and Groups
- RFC 1727 – A Vision of an Integrated Internet Information Service
- RFC 1738 – Uniform Resource Locators (URL)
- RFC 1808 – Relative Uniform Resource Locators
- RFC 2396 – Uniform Resource Identifiers (URI): Generic Syntax
- RFC 4266 – The gopher URI Scheme
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