There's a sense of purity and simplicity there that is hard to recapture through other means—the sense that I'm witnessing something culturally important that, in its own way, could change the world.

Every time I use pieces of the early internet, I get this warm feeling in my chest. It's hard to describe, but I imagine it's a feeling not unlike the feeling that went through the crowd during the Sex Pistols concert at Manchester's Lesser Free Trade Hall on June 4, 1976.

"I like a lot of things about Gopher—its easy parsing, the simple protocol, low bandwidth and computing requirements and relatively few moving parts," he explained to me in an email interview. "I think the Web has gone the wrong direction on all of these attributes, and I didn't want to see Gopher go away in its shadow."

Cameron Kaiser has a lot of time, heart, and soul invested in Gopher. But don't mistake his passion for the protocol and its many servers for mere nostalgia. He sees Gopher as structurally better than the Web in a number of hugely important ways.

That said, not everyone gave up on it. There is still a Gopher scene. It's not like Twitter. It's its own thing, with its own partisans and fans.Here's where Gopher has been, along with where it's going.

That's unlike the web, whose hierarchy is fluid, driven more by the structure of HTML files. Additionally, features like search and the ability to connect to other protocols, like FTP (File Transfer Protocol), were often baked into its structure, rather than offered using separate tools, like Google. In practice, this made Gopher servers much more lightweight than web servers.

Gopher, an protocol for distributing documents and files over the internet, has a lot of similarities to the web, but also some major differences: For one thing, a gopher server is organized around a set hierarchy, akin to mixing a text document and a file server together.

I had that feeling recently when I was reading up on Gopher, a part of the internet that got overshadowed by the World Wide Web but still lingers on in its own quiet way, on port 70, the networking endpoint where it's sat since 1993 .

It feels unadulterated, without the frayed ends and sense of familiarity that come with years or even weeks of constant use. And it's one of those things where, if you feel it once, it's kind of like a drug.

While Kaiser points out there are some weaknesses in the technology he offers, it's hard to ignore the impressiveness of what's mostly a one-man shop. He points in particular to the strides of his Veronica-2 system.

Perhaps the most important thing Floodgap does is it tells you how to actually get on Gopher—which is not an easy thing in the modern day. Despite being in heavy use throughout the early 90s, the technology faded from use as the Web became more common, and as a result, it's difficult to find a modern tool that allows you to connect to Gopher sites. ( One exception is Matt Owen's Gopher Browser , a client for Windows that came to life relatively recently.) Floodgap's Overbite Project has a list of preferred clients so you can get going.

Among the things that Floodgap does that are valuable for Gopher: It watches over a sizable array of unique content on its own Gopher server; it maintains a list of active and recently updated Gopher servers, so they can be easily found and used; it hosts the only active search engine on the entire Gophersphere, an updated variation on the Veronica servers used in the '90s; it keeps a list of clients for each platform ; and, most importantly for people who don't have access to such clients, it offers a Web-based proxy for accessing Gopher sites.

The operator of the retro computing repository Floodgap Systems , who has been active on Gopher since 1993 and has operated his own servers since 1999, has found himself in the position of being the Gopher protocol's most important steward.

"Even though Veronica-2 is hardly Google-class, I'm proud of how much it has indexed, that the system is also aggressive about expiring servers that are gone, and the fact that it gives people a reliable foothold into Gopherspace to look at what's there," he noted by way of example. "Floodgap is also one of the few sites providing automatically maintained news and weather; there is a battery of systems on the backend that find, convert and index content for use and it all runs generally without intervention."

Why put in all this work? In large part, it's because he sees Gopher as an extremely important platform, one that is both structurally consistent and is designed to put the power of the interface into the hands of the user—unlike a website where the visual look and functionality is driven by the developer. This, notes Kaiser, holds benefits specifically for machines of an older vintage.

"The retro community is discovering the ugly truth: If it can't browse the Web, people think it's not useful as a computer," he explained. "And a 1MHz 6502 or an old 68K Mac can't browse the modern Web. But they can browse Gopher because the protocol and interface makes little demand on the client, which happily by simple convergence is also Web-like, and there are many resources out there that are still hosted on Gopher."

"Gopher is the information without the flair, the HTML without the Javascript. Gopher gives me what I want when what I want is to read stuff, not like/comment/interact/favorite/share etc. I'm a big fan of all of those things, but sometimes I just want to read a thing on an old computer and follow a few links. Gopher lets me do that. It's ultimate Old Web and I am one of those ultimate Old Web ladies who still uses Lynx occasionally just so some BOFH will see it in their web logfiles and, hopefully, smile."

— Jessamyn C. West, a Vermont librarian and one-time MetaFilter employee, discussing why she worked to convince the community site to bring back its long-dormant Gopher server, which it relaunched last year after a 15-year hiatus. (BOFH, in case you're wondering, is "Bastard Operator From Hell," a fictional sysadmin that dates back to the Gopher era.)

So how much use is the Gopher version of MetaFilter getting? According to site operator Josh Millard, the read-only server is generally pretty quiet and allowed to live on its lonesome, but it does have a certain appeal for some types of users, especially on long comment threads, when CSS and Javascript can slow down the page. "It's definitely got some appeal as a lightweight option for the nuclear bunker," Milliard said. MetaFilter is by far the best-known mainstream site in the modern-day Gophersphere, but it's far from the only site out there.

Image: Screenshot of GopherVista

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