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| Gopher protocol
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| gopher n. 1. Any of various short tailed, burrowing mammals of
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| the family Geomyidae, of North America. 2. (Amer. colloq.) Native
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| or inhabitant of Minnesota: the Gopher State. 3. (Amer. colloq.)
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| One who runs errands, does odd-jobs, fetches or delivers documents
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| for office staff. 4. (computer tech.) software following a simple
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| protocol for burrowing through a TCP/IP internet.
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| The gopher protocol is a hypertext protocol, defined in the RFC
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| 1436, that "is designed for distributed document search and
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| retrieval". It was developed by Mark McCahill and his team at the
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| University of Minnesota for a campus-wide information system.
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| Gopher offers a simple menu-based interface, files organized as a
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| hierarchical file system similar to FTP. Gophersotes are made up
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| of a menu which is a text file, with a hyperlinkable list of other
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| directories as well as text files, images, soundfiles and binaries
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| , defined by the first caracter in a selector line specifying its
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| item type. The protocol was called gopher after the mascot of
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| University of Minnesota, which is the Gopher, as well as the
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| nature of the protocol as users have to dig into the directories
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| of gophersites in order to retrieve information. Like HTTP which
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| is the protocol used for the World Wide Web, gophersites can also
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| link to other parts of the server as well as link to other gopher
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| servers. The gopher protocol connects via port 70 by default.
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| The gopher protocol has a server-client structure, with clients
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| accessing files on gopher servers. Gopher clients still supported
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| include Firefox (with Overbite WX plug-in wich relays Gopher links
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| over Floodgap Public Gopher Proxy), SeaMonkey (with Overbite FF
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| plug-in which enables native connectivity to gopher), and Lynx (a
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| command-line based browser). Web browsers that do not support
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| gopher natively can also connect via Floodgap's public proxy.
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| The Gopher protocol was developed in 1991, around the same time
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| HTTP was developed by Sir Tim Berners Lee at CERN. However
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| throughout the 1990s, the Gopher protocol fell in popularity as
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| the World Wide Web grew and took dominance and early web browsers
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| at the time dropped support of the protocol, as well as gopher's
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| limited features. However to this day, gopherspace still exists
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| today and is still relatively active, albeit with a much smaller
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| userbase. They are still gopher clients as well as supported
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| gopher server software. In addition, Gopher+ also adds
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| functionality to gopher such as interactive queries. The Veronica
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| search engine, named after the Archie comics character Archie who
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| is also named for the FTP search engine, which stands for Very
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| Easy Rodent-Oriented Network for Internet Computer Archives, was
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| the primary search engine for gopher, originally hosted by the
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| University of Minnesota as well as other servers arouund the world
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| Minnesota no longer hosts the site. However its successor
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| , but is now defunct as the University of Veronica-2 is hosted by
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| Floodgap. In 2018, there are 255 unique gopher servers, counting
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| hosts and port pairs, and 3789821 unique and verified selectors,
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| as stated on the statistics page for Veronica-2. Gopher has also
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| expanded to include phlogs, phikis, chans, and forums.
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| The gopher protocol can be compaired to the HTTP protocol in which
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| both are hypertext protocols which hosts informations as pages.
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| However, the main difference between gopher and the Web is that unlike
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| websites which are designed to be content rich, gophersites are
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| more minimalistic. Websites offer the capability of embedded
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| hypermedia, graphics, and customizability, where as gopher is
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| primarily text-based, with limited support for multimedia.
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| Gophersites, though, are simpler and have a hierarchical menu
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| system, making gophersites easier to organize than websites.
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| Gopher also take up less resources than HTTP. Websites are also
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| more complex, which is constructed using a markup language, most
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| notably HTML, and other enhancements are made with CSS in order to
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| set the style and theme of the website, as well as JavaScript for
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| additional functionality. Gophersites on the other hand, are
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| simply constructed with text files.
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| ===================================
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| Links
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| =====
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| Gopherpedia article about the Gopher protocol. |
 | Wikipedia article about the Gopher protocol (Web link) |
| RFC 1436 - The Internet Gopher Protocol |
| Floodgap gopher hole. |
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| History for article "Gopher protocol" |