Gopher History

The Gopher protocol ( /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 attractive alternative to the World Wide Web in its early stages, but ultimately failed to achieve popularity.

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.

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.

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.^[10] As a consequence of this, some users were concerned that a licensing fee would also be charged for independent implementations.^[11][12] Users were scared away from Gopher technology, to the advantage of the Web, which CERN disclaimed ownership of.^[13] The University of Minnesota later re-licensed its Gopher software under the GNU GPL.^[14]
• 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, 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 2010, there are approximately 150 gopher servers indexed by Veronica-2,^[15] reflecting a slow growth from 2007 when there were fewer than 100,^[16] although many are infrequently updated. 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.^[17] A snapshot of Gopherspace as it was in 2007 was circulated on BitTorrent and is still available.^[18] 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.^[19][20]