Gopher mainly fell out of favor as an information protocol because of a perceived blunder on the part of the University of Minnesota. Sure they released the protocol, client, and server for educational use, but reserved the right to charge companies for the use of the server when/if it would ever be used for commercial use (remember at the time, there was no commercial use of the internet). All of a sudden http became the hot new protocol of choice. With all the IIS worms like Code Red and Nimda coming out, not to mention ISPs who've begun filtering incoming www requests as mine has done, I'm wondering whether there may be a quiet return on a limited basis to the use of gopher.
NS 3.04 and 4.76 both support it. The Mozilla I occasionally use, 0.7, doesn't, but I see it HAS since been incorporated into 0.8.1. Apparently there is a demand. Lynx also continues to support gopher. Gopher is a very lightweight protocol, so the server is only ~50K, as is a command-line gopher client, and even the bloated client-side Xgopher comes in at around 200K. Arachne (well, Linux Arachne, anyway) seems to be semi-aware of gopher already, since she inserts the correct port number in the URL... i.e., if I type at the command line, 'arachne gopher://localhost' she returns an error screen claiming "Unknown Protocol in URL" BUT, the "gopher://localhost"; from the command line has now become "gopher://localhost:70/"; in her URL line. It would appear that Arachne knows that gopher is to be found on port 70. Unfortunately, that's about all she seems to know. I wonder if Arachne will someday be fully gopher capable like Netscape, Mozilla, and presumably IE. Though my ISP seems to have clamped down on http requests, it doesn't filter all incoming SYN packets, so hopefully, requests to a gopher server can make it through. Is anyone able to retrieve this file (either with DOS Arachne, or any gopher client)? gopher://wizard.dyndns.org:70/9I/Xgopher.png If not that file directly, how about through the main menu at gopher://wizard.dyndns.org ? - Steve
