Gopher Novice - Part VI.

Cont. [Gopher Novice - Part V]

Finally I got some articles about how to use Gophersphere. I've read [Diving into the Internet from 1994] and concerns of worse net from that times:

Unfortunately, that's what Gopherspace is today. Anybody can install and advertise a Gopher.

Then [Big Dummy's Guide to the Internet from 1994]:

8.8. WHEN THINGS GO WRONG

As the Internet grows ever more popular, its resources come under more of a strain. If you try to use gopher in the middle of the day, at least on the East Coast of the U.S., you'll sometimes notice that it takes a very long time for particular menus or database searches to come up.

And

8.9 FYI

David Riggins maintains a list of gophers by type and category. You can find the most recent one at the ftp site ftp.einet.net, in the pub directory. Look for a file with a name like "gopher-jewels.txt." Alternately, you can get on a mailing list to get the latest version sent

I started connecting information from many places. I've spotted an archive of many articles about Gophersphere. There are informations from every point of Gopher history - [Vogue Growth Era, Mass Defection Era and Stagnancy Era].

When I've been reading about [The WELL Gopher] I can easily navigate to [The WELL's GopherSpace] at Gopher Wayback Machine.

Next I've read about [Gopher Jewels], which I've seen at second guide, and, despite there are no information at Gopher Wayback Machine, I can obtain its WWW's version at [Gopher Jewels at Web Archive].

I've found also, missed earlier, [Funny Bone 1997-2001] zine.

Step by step I try to imagine what was the Gophersphere like. Just take a look at Gopher Jewels and a wealth of structured data. It seems that it was easier to get the scientific information than today. Look at the [The WELL - Bruce Sterling] with many content of Shismatrix author. There are also many transcripts and so on. Interesting one is ["Free as Air, Free As Water, Free As Knowledge"].

I look at it as some forgotten, for two decades, wisdom. We can read [Diving into the Internet from 1994]:

8. When you take information from the Internet, remember that you owe a debt to those who made it available. Repay your debt by making your own contribution. Ask your local Gopher master; he or she will probably be happy to accept a donation of time to help organize, update, index, and improve the system.

What is interesting, and maybe a bit funny, that more content I'm consuming in Gopher-style, the more I like it. It's true that content provided in one way is easier to process. Content is on the first place, not a fancy project of modern websites which are only content providers. I realised that I look to much at the appearance of the webpages.

=> [Gopher Novice - Part V] | [Vogue Growth Era, Mass Defection Era and Stagnancy Era] | [The WELL Gopher] | [Gopher Jewels] | [Gopher Jewels at Web Archive] | [The WELL's GopherSpace] | [Diving into the Internet from 1994] | [Big Dummy's Guide to the Internet from 1994] | [Funny Bone 1997-2001] | [The WELL - Bruce Sterling] | ["Free as Air, Free As Water, Free As Knowledge"] | [Diving into the Internet from 1994]

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szczezuja.space CC BY-SA

@ Mon 30 Aug 2021 10:22:37 PM CEST

tags: #gopher, #archive