What is Digg?75 Comments
- Paktu, on 10/12/2007, -6/+60Then mark it as lame and shut the ***** up.
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -1/+37Is it just me, or does anyone else find it funny to refer to stuff from the '90s as "historical documents"?
- sedition, on 10/12/2007, -0/+35"Chances of Gopher surviving Digg?..."
Pretty damn good. It's all text and has very little overhead. Not to mention it's run by the WELL. People that knew what they were doing before you were born. - FCon4, on 10/12/2007, -0/+21Now, now...don't get all historical on us.
- ztirffritz, on 10/12/2007, -0/+18Wow...I feel old now. I may be historical.
- mdesjardins, on 10/12/2007, -0/+17Actually, I read somewhere that there was some new interest in using the gopher protocol on cell phones. Turns out the minimalist interface of gopher actually works better on the tiny screens than web clients.
- strictnein, on 10/12/2007, -0/+17Yeah, I don't get the "Historical" part. Some of us actually were on ther Intraweb before 1999 and were using gopher, telnet, ftp, etc.
- synthrabbit, on 10/12/2007, -0/+13I remember using Gopher on my PC XT (8088) using Telix to connect to my university's VMS/VAX server. Good times.
- crilen007, on 10/12/2007, -0/+13I just found this: gopher://gopher.well.com/00/hacking/powerglove-faq
lol, powerglove hacking.
OLD SCHOOL! - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -2/+14I remember when i thought archie and veronica were awesome.
- bigbadunix, on 10/12/2007, -0/+12You got that right. It's funny, when you start becoming every thing that you mocked when you were a clueless, green runt.
I'd still prefer sitting in the basement of the Engineering and Mathematical Science building on an old z80, using gopher, archie, veronica, oh, and wais.
I'll get my old ass out of the way on memory lane now, before I get run over. - CovardeAnonimo, on 10/12/2007, -0/+10at one time i found some funny conspiracy theories hosted on gopher servers.
gopher space is a good place to put odd ball stuff you don't want google to see - shumacher, on 10/12/2007, -0/+10I used to use gopher more than www up to about 1995, when I upgraded to enough machine to handle a graphical browser. I've been on a retro kick lately with finger and gopher. Good times. Good times.
- Paktu, on 10/12/2007, -0/+9In recent years, there's been a push at the University of Minnesota to try and commercialize things invented here. Apparently, this happened after the University discovered that its failure to capitalize on Gopher cost it $500 million in lost revenues. To put this in perspective, the school's entire endowment is slightly less than $1 billion.
- EricAnderton, on 10/12/2007, -0/+8That depends. Consider the following:
- As I understand it, the technical definition of "antique" is anything over 25 years old.
- If you follow the strictest interpretation of darwinian evolution, you're pretty much "biologically obsolete" once you're old enough to have reproduced at least twice and raised each to the age of a teenager.
So if you're in your mid-20's, then congrats: you're an obsolete antique. So there's no harm in throwing "old" and "historical" on top while you're at it. :p - texnofobix, on 10/12/2007, -0/+8now all we need is Gopher 2.0
- pplante, on 10/12/2007, -0/+8you barely even know what gopher is then :)
- georgehotelling, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7"the University discovered that its failure to capitalize on Gopher cost it $500 million in lost revenues." Do they really think Gopher adoption would have been what it was if they had charged for it? Tim Berners-Lee was asked if he regretted not charging for the web and his response was along the lines of "if I charged for it, I wouldn't have made a penny because no one would have used it."
- crilen007, on 10/12/2007, -2/+9Yes, "were". You aren't anymore.. I hope.
- Tatusmi, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7wow... I remember Gopher. That seems so long ago... yet still weird to call it "historical".
- joelito, on 10/12/2007, -2/+8It's historical to me...
I entered the Web in december '99 - EricAnderton, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6@wowbagger.
Guilty as charged. How does that old expression go?
In the USA, 200 years is a long time.
In the UK, 200 miles is a long way. - geronimo, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5Interesting. I guess if you think about it, WML decks are very similar to gopher. I don't see gopher actually replacing WML though, WML works just fine.
- LegendarySock, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5Imagine that, 15 years later and we find Gopher "historical." What next? 15 years later and we'll be finding todays Internet (currently constructed of a series of tubes) historical? I wonder what will be the "internet" of 2021?
- shumacher, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5Wow. Powerglove hacking! That's close to my first exposure to usenet. Someone on Prodigy forwarded some usenet discussion on virtual reality and REND386 to me.
- becominglumberg, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5Hey- keep them up if they fufill their purpose. If it ain't broke...
- theevilmonkey, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5@sedition
"People that knew what they were doing before you were born."
Is the best phrase I've read all week. If I had the money I'd buy you a t-shirt :) - Madh2orat, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5By 2021, the tubes will be replaced with a series of copper strands.
- UrsusMorologus, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5Gopher is lightweight and extensible. It's not really fair to call it a text-only tool, since it can point to non-gopher, non-text resources (TELNET, files on a FTP server, etc). Or if you insist that the protocol is text therefore the whole thing is text well guess what sunshine the same goes for HTML/HTTP.
The reason it died so horribly is that it wasn't HTTP, which could do the same functions with better visuals and hyperlinking. Gopher is very strict in its hierarchical ordering, which makes it great for a menuing system, but lousy as a front-end to the Internet.
The protocol spec has some pretty nasty bugs too. The thing was developed in-house, and then published as an RFC, with the latter consisting of mostly wishful thinking about what the authors wished they had done right. For example the protocol mandates CR-LF pairs with no exceptions, but all the software only used bare LF, and a lot of it would choke on CR-LF.
Overall its an interesting and important piece of work, but one that is safely forgotton. - jknight, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4From this article: gopher://gopher.well.com/00/Communications/not.just.wires
I love this comment:
I have to admit that I'm really sick and tired of the Information
highway. I feel like I've already heard so much about it that it must
be come and gone already, yet there is no sign of it. This is truly a
piece of federal vaporware.
Classic. I think she may have been wrong..... (or at least early) - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -3/+7"- As I understand it, the technical definition of "antique" is anything over 25 years old."
Only in the USA where there is no history so anything older than 25 years old appears to be ancient. - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4Wow, an XT. You were a lucky one then, I had my dual floppy PC that seemed like a downgrade to me coming from Apple ][ euro with a 5meg symbfile running UCSDp.
Remember the piggy back RAM in those XT's ? :-) - NJank, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4now that's just crazy talk...
- dpollitt, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5Gopher was invented at the University of Minnesota Duluth campus. It was commercialized via the University of Minnesota Twin Cities campus. Article not completely accurate on this topic. Small technicality, but it's true.
- atmicrat, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3They should put ads on the back of the football team. Talk about lost revenue!
- Snakedal337, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3W3M my friend :-)
(or in ubuntu I believe a hotlink is "www " - shm0edawg, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3i was connecting to college gopher and wais sites in 1992 on a 2400 baud modem. Back then the text just flew onto the screen. A few years later I got a 28800 modem and got a graphical browser and thought to myself, "they can't possibly make it any faster." The kinda sad part is..... some people are still connected to 56k. That's an almost antique technology now.
- astrosmash, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4I was going to say that these are best viewed in 'lynx', but it seems today's Linux distributions don't even include lynx anymore by default; none of the Linux machines I have access to have it installed. What a shame.
- sirmalloc, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3I very much miss gopher://wiretap.spies.com, it's just not the same feeling browsing the content via the web at http://wiretap.area.com/Gopher/Library/
- sailor, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3I was just about to comment on that...sheesh historical?...
try http://www.textfiles.com for some old txt files from the glorious BBS days..:) - vertigoblue, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3"i love, the powerglove..."
- becominglumberg, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3I think antique is different for furniture than computers. Anyone still running Windows 95 is running an antique right now.
- bigteebo, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Too bad Gopher couldn't be reborn on cell phones since it's so lightweight.
- ekeup, on 10/12/2007, -5/+8Chances of Gopher surviving Digg?...
haha - Web_Weasel, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2I remember finding a few gopher servers that did just that. The spambots can't deal with gopher so you can put your email address there.
- gaijin, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2One of the "historical documents" at the Well is Phil Zimmerman's email announcing that they were dropping the criminal case against him for posting PGP to Usenet!
Jeez, I feel old. - evilbeagle, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2So what year did they see these kiosks at the Duluth campus? Funny you say the document proves nothing when you are willing to accept the word of faculty... Maybe Duluth was responsible for all that "crappy code" that kept the U from making money off of it. Yes, they did try to make money off of gopher and failed miserably.
Yes, I am an old timer and a "fuzzy monkey" (inside joke) and knew someone mentioned in the RFC when gopher was being developed. I have never heard of Duluth writing it - They could have come up with the idea, but I doubt they developed the protocol. - kyote, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2@atmicrat - don't they already? there's logos all over them?
- jawngee, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Memories. I was going to school in Minneapolis in 93 and was lucky enough to be at a school with some forward thinking IT staff. Other than the U of M, I think MCAD was the only other college in Minneapolis wired for the internet at that time.
Browsing gopher on NeXT boxes. Good times. Later, I worked in a studio next door a company setup by one of the main developers of Gopher. I recall him saying a couple of times that Gopher had been marketed incorrectly by the U of M, hence it's death.
But, I honestly think it was the lack of animated monkey gifs... -
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