Answer: the Gopher protocol developed in the 1990s at the University of Minnesota may have been eclipsed by the World Wide Web, but it's alive and kicking (even if somewhat underground). Floodgap.com shows that more than 250 active gopher servers are currently online (almost half of affiliated with American colleges and universities) and can be found on every continent but Africa and Antarctica. Gopher-enthusiast John Goerzen believes that gopher is an excellent alternative to PDA and smartphone Web browsers, and says: "Consider this example: Port-a-Goph, a gopher client in development for Palm OS. Cameron Kaiser wrote this in his spare time and got it working quickly on his own Palm," he said. "Contrast that with the state of Web browsing on handheld devices: Despite many years to improve them, I still regularly run across Web sites that simply do not render at all, or render so poorly that they are unusable."
My LinkSeries Internet Guides were written in 1992 - 1994 that list all the gopher sites for academic research and were used in academic libraries around the world in search of scholarly information from the Internet. These have been replaced and updated with my latest 2004 Internet MiniGuides.
posted by Marcus Zillman |
4:00 AM
