[BALUG-Talk] Market research on Gopher

[Ben Newman]

I used it quite a bit in college and remember it fondly, but HTML just
killed it both on the ease of publishing and use.   I don't think I
ever used it again when Lynx got installed on our servers.
For me the evolution of mid 90s era internet document handling goes
something like this:  Gopher > Lynx > Mosaic > Mozilla

On Mon, Sep 28, 2009 at 1:37 PM, Bill Ward <bill at wards.net> wrote:
> Well, I was in college at the time and didn't really have a lot of use
> for it.  I could use it to locate and download some open source
> software (though we didn't call it that then) but since I didn't
> manage any systems I didn't have much cause to do so.  I didn't do
> "scientific computing" (I'm still not quite sure what that means) then
> - I wrote code.  By the time I graduated, NCSA Mosaic was available, I
> think.
>
> On Mon, Sep 28, 2009 at 1:35 PM, John Mark Walker <johnmark at johnmark.org> wrote:
>> I have a much different recollection of Gopher. For scientific computing, it
>> was Gopher and FTP. Gopher was a great way to access documents and software
>> downloads. Our university Gopher system was really great.
>>
>> I don't know if the demise of Gopher was due to the software being difficult
>> to manage or because it was proprietary and more expensive. Whatever the
>> case, I thought it was a useful thing to have at the time. However, I can't
>> remember what it could do that couldn't be done over HTTP or FTP.
>>
>> -JM
>>
>>
>> On Mon, Sep 28, 2009 at 1:27 PM, Bill Ward <bill at wards.net> wrote:
>>>
>>> As I recall Gopher wasn't really around very long before we started
>>> seeing the Web replace it.  I never really used it much and don't
>>> remember much about it.  I think of it as basically just being a
>>> listing of FTP sites, and the Yahoo! Directory was its most direct
>>> replacement.
>>>
>>> On Mon, Sep 28, 2009 at 1:25 PM, Duke Dougal <dukedougal at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> > Hi Nick,
>>> >
>>> > "We" are a startup company in Australia that has built this
>>> > www.sema5.com
>>> >
>>> > Beta testers keep telling us that we have built something that looks
>>> > like
>>> > Gopher so I've done some research on Gopher and now I'm asking what
>>> > people
>>> > think of Gopher and if they remember it with positive or negative
>>> > thoughts.
>>> >
>>> > Andrew
>>> >
>>> >
>>> >
>>> > On Tue, Sep 29, 2009 at 1:50 AM, Nick Moffitt <nick at zork.net> wrote:
>>> >>
>>> >> Rick Moen:
>>> >> > Quoting Duke Dougal (dukedougal at gmail.com):
>>> >> > > We're doing some market research on attitudes to Gopher.
>>> >> >
>>> >> > Who are "we", for starters?
>>> >>
>>> >> Seconded.
>>> >>
>>> >> --
>>> >> "It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to
>>> >> find out how nature *is*.  Physics concerns what we can
>>> >> *say* about nature."
>>> >>                -- Niels Bohr
>>> >> _______________________________________________
>>> >> BALUG-Talk mailing list
>>> >> BALUG-Talk at lists.balug.org
>>> >> http://lists.balug.org/listinfo.cgi/balug-talk-balug.org
>>> >
>>> >
>>> > _______________________________________________
>>> > BALUG-Talk mailing list
>>> > BALUG-Talk at lists.balug.org
>>> > http://lists.balug.org/listinfo.cgi/balug-talk-balug.org
>>> >
>>> >
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> --
>>> Check out my LEGO blog at http://www.brickpile.com/
>>> View my photos at http://flickr.com/photos/billward/
>>> Follow me at http://twitter.com/williamward
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> BALUG-Talk mailing list
>>> BALUG-Talk at lists.balug.org
>>> http://lists.balug.org/listinfo.cgi/balug-talk-balug.org
>>
>>
>
>
>
> --
> Check out my LEGO blog at http://www.brickpile.com/
> View my photos at http://flickr.com/photos/billward/
> Follow me at http://twitter.com/williamward
> _______________________________________________
> BALUG-Talk mailing list
> BALUG-Talk at lists.balug.org
> http://lists.balug.org/listinfo.cgi/balug-talk-balug.org
>



-- 
~Ben Newman