The Gopher protocol is a TCP/IP The Internet Protocol Suite is the set of communications protocols used for the Internet and other similar networks. It is named from two of the most important protocols in it: the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and the Internet Protocol (IP), which were the first two networking protocols defined in this standard. Today's IP networking Application layer protocol designed for distributing, searching, and retrieving documents over the Internet. Software using this protocol was a predecessor of (and later, an alternative to) the World Wide Web The World Wide Web, abbreviated as WWW and commonly known as the Web, is a system of interlinked hypertext documents accessed via the Internet. With a web browser, one can view web pages that may contain text, images, videos, and other multimedia and navigate between them by using hyperlinks. Using concepts from earlier hypertext systems, British. 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 well-suited to computing environments that rely heavily on remote text-oriented computer terminals A computer terminal is an electronic or electromechanical hardware device that is used for entering data into, and displaying data from, a computer or a computing system. Early terminals were inexpensive devices but very slow compared to punched cards or paper tape for input, but as the technology improved and video displays were introduced,, common in universities at the time of its creation in 1991 until 1993.[1]
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Origins
The original Gopher system was released in late spring of 1991 by Mark McCahill Mark P. McCahill has been involved in developing and popularizing a number of Internet technologies since the late 1980s, Farhad Anklesaria, Paul Lindner, Daniel Torrey, and Bob Alberti of the University of Minnesota The University of Minnesota, Twin Cities is a public research university located in Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota, United States. It is the oldest and largest part of the University of Minnesota system and has the fifth-largest main campus student body in the United States, with 51,140 students in 2008–2009. Its central goals were:
- 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 to include things like searches
The source of the name "Gopher" is claimed to be threefold:
- Users instruct it to "go for" information
- It does so through a web of menu items analogous to gopher A gopher is the common name for any of several small burrowing rodents endemic to North America, including the pocket gopher , also called true gophers, and the ground squirrel (family Sciuridae), including Richardson's ground squirrel holes
- The sports teams of the University of Minnesota are the Golden Gophers The Minnesota Golden Gophers are the college sports team for the University of Minnesota. The university fields both men's and women's teams in basketball, cross country, gymnastics, golf, ice hockey, swimming, tennis, and track and field. Men's-specific sports include baseball, football, and wrestling. Women's-specific sports include rowing,
Gopher combines document hierarchies with collections of services, including WAIS Wide Area Information Servers or WAIS is a client-server text searching system that uses the ANSI Standard Z39.50 Information Retrieval Service Definition and Protocol Specifications for Library Applications" to search index databases on remote computers. It was developed in the late 1980s as a project of Thinking Machines, Apple Computer,, the Archie Archie is a tool for indexing FTP archives, allowing people to find specific files. It is considered to be the first Internet search engine. The original implementation was written in 1990 by Alan Emtage, Bill Heelan, and J. Peter Deutsch, then students at McGill University in Montreal and Veronica Veronica is a search engine system for the Gopher protocol, developed in 1992 by Steven Foster and Fred Barrie at the University of Nevada, Reno search engines, and gateways to other information systems such as ftp File Transfer Protocol is a standard network protocol used to copy a file from one host to another over a TCP/IP-based network, such as the Internet. FTP is built on a client-server architecture and utilizes separate control and data connections between the client and server. FTP is used with user-based password authentication or with anonymous and Usenet Duke University graduate students Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis conceived the idea in 1979 and it was established in 1980. Users read and post messages to one or more categories, known as newsgroups. Usenet resembles a bulletin board system (BBS) in many respects, and is the precursor to the various Internet forums that are widely used today; and can.
The general interest in Campus-Wide Information Systems (CWISs)[2] 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 A CCSO name-server or Ph protocol was an early form of database search on the web. In its most common form it was used to look up information such as phone numbers and e-mail addresses. Today this service has been largely replaced by LDAP. It was used mainly in the early-to-middle 1990s. The name-server was developed by Steve Dorner at the entry in Gopher, and query the nameserver.[3]
The exponential scaling of utility in social networked systems (Reed's law Reed's law is the assertion of David P. Reed that the utility of large networks, particularly social networks, can scale exponentially with the size of the network) seen in Gopher, and then the Web, is a common feature of networked hypermedia systems with distributed authoring. In 1993–1994, Web pages commonly contained large numbers of links to Gopher-delivered resources.
Stagnation
The World Wide Web The World Wide Web, abbreviated as WWW and commonly known as the Web, is a system of interlinked hypertext documents accessed via the Internet. With a web browser, one can view web pages that may contain text, images, videos, and other multimedia and navigate between them by using hyperlinks. Using concepts from earlier hypertext systems, British 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 The University of Minnesota, Twin Cities is a public research university located in Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota, United States. It is the oldest and largest part of the University of Minnesota system and has the fifth-largest main campus student body in the United States, with 51,140 students in 2008–2009 announced that it would charge licensing fees for the use of its implementation of the Gopher server.[4] As a consequence of this, some users suspected that a licensing fee would also be charged for independent implementations.[5][6] In contrast, no such limitation has yet been imposed on the World Wide Web. The University of Minnesota eventually re-licensed its Gopher software under the GNU GPL The GNU General Public License is a widely used free software license, originally written by Richard Stallman for the GNU project.[7]
- Gopher Client functionality was quickly duplicated by early Web browsers, such as Mosaic Mosaic is the web browser credited with popularizing the World Wide Web. It was also a client for earlier protocols such as FTP, Usenet, and Gopher. Its clean, easily understood user interface, reliability, Windows port and simple installation all contributed to making it the application that opened up the Web to the general public. Mosaic was. Furthermore, the user friendliness of the World Wide Web, with its integration of text and graphics, made Gopher less appealing.
- Gopher has an inflexible structure when compared to the free-form HTML HTML, which stands for HyperText Markup Language, is the predominant markup language for web pages. It is written in the form of HTML elements consisting of "tags" surrounded by angle brackets within the web page content of the Web. With Gopher, every document has a defined format and type, and the typical user must navigate through a single server-defined menu system to get to a particular document.
Availability of Gopher today
Recently[update], there have been attempts to revive the use of Gopher. One such attempt is the Overbite project The Overbite extension for Mozilla Firefox is designed to extend the capabilities of Mozilla Firefox in respect of browsing sites that use the Gopher protocol and to ensure that Mozilla Firefox users will be able to continue accessing Gopher sites should Gopher support be removed from Mozilla Firefox. It includes support for accessing Gopher[8], a Firefox extension that adds better support for the protocol to Firefox.
As of 2008[update], there are approximately 125 gopher servers indexed by Veronica-2 Veronica is a search engine system for the Gopher protocol, developed in 1992 by Steven Foster and Fred Barrie at the University of Nevada, Reno,[9] a slow growth from 2007 when there were fewer than 100.[10] Many of them are owned by universities in various parts of the world. Most of them are neglected and rarely updated except for the ones run by enthusiasts of the protocol. A handful of new servers are set up every year by hobbyists — 30 have been set up and added to Floodgap's list since 1999[11] and possibly some more that haven't been added. 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 way, principally on April Fools' Day April Fools' Day or All Fools' Day is a day celebrated in various countries on April 1. The day is marked by the commission of hoaxes and other practical jokes of varying sophistication on friends, family members, enemies, and neighbors, or sending them on a fool's errand, the aim of which is to embarrass the gullible[12][13]
Some have suggested that the bandwidth-sparing simple interface of Gopher would be a good match for mobile phones A mobile phone is an electronic device used for full duplex two-way radio telecommunications over a cellular network of base stations known as cell sites. Mobile phones differ from cordless telephones, which only offer telephone service within limited range through a single base station attached to a fixed land line, for example within a home or and Personal digital assistants A personal digital assistant is a mobile device, also known as a palmtop computer. PDAs are used to organize a person's life by taking notes, holding contacts, and connecting to the Internet. Newer PDAs commonly have color screens and audio capabilities, enabling them to be used as mobile phones (smartphones), web browsers, or portable media (PDAs),[14] but so far, Wireless Markup Language Wireless Markup Language, based on XML, is a markup language intended for devices that implement the Wireless Application Protocol specification, such as mobile phones, and preceded the use of other markup languages now used with WAP, such as HTML/XHTML (which are gaining in popularity as processing power in mobile devices increases) (WML)/Wireless Application Protocol Wireless Application Protocol is an open international standard for application-layer network communications in a wireless-communication environment. Most use of WAP involves accessing the mobile web from a mobile phone or from a PDA (WAP), DoCoMo i-mode NTT DoCoMo's i-mode is a mobile internet service popular in Japan. Unlike Wireless Application Protocol or WAP, i-mode encompasses a wider variety of internet standards, including web access, e-mail and the packet-switched network that delivers the data. i-mode users have access to various services such as e-mail, sports results, weather forecast,, XHTML Basic XHTML is a family of XML markup languages that mirror or extend versions of the widely used Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), the language in which web pages are written or other adaptations of HTML HTML, which stands for HyperText Markup Language, is the predominant markup language for web pages. It is written in the form of HTML elements consisting of "tags" surrounded by angle brackets within the web page content and XML Extensible Markup Language is a set of rules for encoding documents in machine-readable form. It is defined in the XML 1.0 Specification produced by the W3C, and several other related specifications, all gratis open standards, have proved more popular. The PyGopherd PyGopherd is a modern Internet Gopher server written in Python and is maintained by John Goerzen. In addition to support for RFC 1436 Gopher and Gopher+, PyGopherd also supports HTTP and WAP server, however, provides a built-in WML front-end to Gopher sites served with it.
Gopher support in Web browsers
Mozilla Firefox 3.7 displaying the top-level menu of the Floodgap gopher serverGopher support was disabled in Internet Explorer versions 5.* and 6 for Windows in June 2002 by a patch meant to fix a security vulnerability in the browser's Gopher protocol handler; however, it can be re-enabled by editing the Windows registry. In Internet Explorer 7, Gopher support was removed on the WinINET level.[19]
Other browsers, including Mozilla Application Suite (deprecated), still support the protocol, but incompletely—the most obvious deficiency is that they cannot display the informational text found on many Gopher menus.
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, MacOS 7x, MVS, NeXT, OS/2 Warp, most UNIX-like operating systems, VMS, Windows 3x, 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 Port 70.
A copy of every known Gopher Client is permanently archived on the HAL3000 Gopher Server. The Clients may be freely downloaded from the HTTP link: http://hal3000.cx:70/Begin_Here/Clients
Gopher to HTTP gateways
Users of Web browsers that have incomplete or no support for Gopher[20] can access content on Gopher servers via a server gateway that converts Gopher menus into HTML. GN and PyGopherd are two examples of Gopher server software that have built-in Gopher to HTTP interfaces. An active example of such a dual protocol server is Hal3000. Another is Floodgap. By default any Squid cache proxy server will act as a Gopher to HTTP gateway.
Gopher characteristics
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. A Gopher menu listing other accessible servers.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.
Technical details
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Fri, 30 Jul 2010 20:34:21 GMT+00:00
GigaOm (blog) The tech sector has been waiting for micro-payments for so long that the original plans involved using ASCII text and the Gopher protocol . Still waiting. ...
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Request the item from a Gopher server if the user selects an item from a gopher menu The picture below shows a Gopher menu presented by the Gopher client program
Q. I tried this configuring how Firefox connect to the internet. It works but whenever I restart or close the Firefox and then open again it refuses to accept proxy. This happens to my Google Chrome and IE and Opera. Google Chrome: Error 102 (net::ERR_Connection_REFU SED): Unknown error. Firefox: The proxy server is refusing connections Firefox is configured to use a proxy server that is refusing connections. * Check the proxy settings to make sure that they are correct. * Contact your network administrator to make sure the proxy server is working. IE Internet Explorer cannot display the webpage. Opera Could not connect to proxy server. Access denied Here's what I checked from my Firefox it automatically reverts to Manual Proxy: [cont.]
Asked by aloha - Wed Dec 16 03:13:00 2009 - - 1 Answers - 0 Comments
A. Sorry, Don't mean to be a prick here, But it sounds to me like your browsers are smarter than you. They know there using a bad proxy. You don't. Proxy's are just thinly disguised malware/spyware most of the time. Your browsers know it. You should listen to your browsers and stop trying to look at porn through a proxy.
Answered by Lex Luthor/Antivirus Tester - Wed Dec 16 03:58:13 2009
