Gopher (protocol)

Gopher (1993)

Gopher (English for gopher ) is an information service that can be accessed over the Internet using a Gopherclients.

Word origin

For the choice of the name, there are several theories:

• Pocket rat, which serves as the mascot of the University of Minnesota.
• " Gopher " is onomatopoeic for " Go for it " or "Go- For" ( colloquially known as the " go- fer" to German as " errand boy ").

History

Gopher is similar to the early World Wide Web ( WWW) and was developed in 1991 under the direction of Mark P. McCahill at the University of Minnesota. The default port number is 70

The reasoning that led to Gopher, was the cumbersome handling of FTP ( file transfer protocol), where you log in and had to switch via console commands in directories to find the desired file and be able to download. In addition, they wanted to create an easy-to -administer information system that requires little resources.

Mid-1990s had some organizations who possessed an Internet connection, for example, universities or governments, a Gopherserver and presented to the general public on information from all areas.

With the rise of the WWW and the now much more comfortable FTP programs, however, went the time of Gopherspace to an end. The reason for the decline was the decision of the University of Minnesota, which holds the copyright to Gopher to charge a fee for the commercial use of the Service.

Today there are very few Gopherserver. Gopher is thus largely out of use and forgotten.

Operation

Gopher builds on the Gopherprotokoll which is defined in RFC 1436.

Gopher offers unlike HTML pages to an automatically generated menu that is generated from the files located in the current directory. The Gopherserver recognizes whether it is directory or file, and displays this by corresponding symbols (see figure).

In addition to offering Gopherserver configuration files that allow the operator to generate references to external Gopherserver.

For the Gopherserver gopherd that comes for example in the Linux distribution Debian, this file looks under construction as follows:

Name = Web Server on Athena Type = h Path = GET / Host = athene.dnsalias.org Port = 80 # Name = NCT Gopher server Type = 1 Port = 70 Path = / Host = gopher.nct.de This file contains a reference to a web server, but also a reference to another Gopherserver is defined firstly.

This file is stored in a directory under the name of Gopherservers. Links (note the dot before the file name ).

Unlike websites Gopherseiten are plain text files without formatting or embedded images.

Clients

For Gophers have their own clients, but these are not added to all operating system distributions.

One way to explore the Gopherspace, offered some Web browsers:

• As of version 4 of Mozilla Firefox and SeaMonkey version 2.1 of the support Gopher was removed in these browsers.
• The Windows Internet Explorer dominates the Gopherprotokoll since version 6.0 Service Pack 1 ( September 2002) no longer, the function has been disabled due to security holes in the program; it was not thought Gopher important enough to fix the error for.
• New WebKit - based browsers such as Chrome or Safari have not even fitted a Gopherclient.

The project overbite of the Californian Cameron Kaiser add- ons are provided for current browsers and mobile devices that offer or allow it only improved support for Gopher.

In the WWW, you can find websites that provide an interface from Gopherspace in the WWW. Such an interface is, for example, the proxy Squid available.