Internet in the 90s? How it was? Part 1: Gopher

I am starting to publish a series of reviews devoted to Internet protocols, common and not very common in the nineties of the twentieth century. This is done primarily in order to identify alternative methods of communication within the global web in the light of endless leaks of corporate and private information. Without any kind of blockchains and domains of the Onion zone. Simply put, without the modern mythology of planned obsolescence.

And the first Internet protocol of the nineties with which we will begin our acquaintance will be Gopher. He was chosen due to the fact that a rather negative reputation has developed around him in narrow computer circles. Namely as a non-functional and useless protocol. But this is only because the authors of such statements have never delved into the settings and configuration of this product.

The Gopher standard and viewer (browser) were developed at the University of Minnesota in 1991 as part of a program to enable easy document sharing over the Internet. Between people, institutions and even countries. Gopher's popularity increased when the Veronica and Jughead search engines were developed. The protocol itself was named after the gopher, the mascot of the University of Minnesota football team.

But in February 1993, the aforementioned institution decided to start charging licensing fees for Gopher servers. What caused a reasonable panic among the owners of these services. At the same time, CERN gave up the rights to the WWW standard, which stopped the popularization of Gopher. It wasn't until 2000 that the University of Minnesota re-licensed the development under the GNU General Public License. But as you can imagine, precious time was lost.

Electrical engineering vs computer engineering

Nevertheless, this protocol today may be of interest not only to corporate developers, but also simply to lovers of closed data exchange. Outside the ubiquitous Google, Microsoft and Yandex bots.

The first thing that strikes you about Gopher is its minimalistic requirements and dimensions. The server archive takes some 290 kb, and the WSgopher client 368 kb, respectively. The second thing that pleases me is full cross-platform functionality. There are servers and browsers for absolutely any operating system from Dos and Unix to MacOS and Windows. For example, for the review we used Motsognir for Winodws 9x, which works great even in XP. Available for download like other solutions from this page: http://www.jumpjet.info/Offbeat-Internet/Gopher/Servers/OS/specific.htm

The third and not unimportant feature of the protocol is the simplicity of server configuration. If in WWW we are used to endless configuration files with many modules connected, then with Gopher things are easier. There are only two configuration files. One directly owned by the server developers, but designed according to protocol standards. The full description of which, in the case of Motsognir, is in the manuals.pdf file, inside the archive. The second gophermap file is created if desired by the owner in the public (shared) directory with files. It manages not only the listing of catalogs, but also their design. It's kind of a mixture of a modern .htaccess file with the usual html tags of a different standard. Examples of gophermap file settings can be found on the Internet.

At the same time, the most important myth discovered among Russian-speaking commentators was the allegedly static nature of the protocol. Although this is not the case. After all, the Gopher server supports the inclusion of not only GGI, but even PHP. That is, de facto, the protocol implements dynamic content, despite the ascetic appearance of the basic configuration. Moreover, if desired, the server can be configured in such a way that access to the service will be carried out only through accounts exported from Telnet for UNIX or Linux. Simply put, it is possible to password-protect directories and the server itself.

For developers, the task is also simplified due to the fact that Gopher is open source. So, if you wish, you can edit it in your own way. This protocol functions as standard through the 70th port. And it also allows you to prescribe the specialization of files for viewing by external applications of users.

All in all, I have a very good impression of setting up and configuring the Gopher client / server. And its flexibility and cross-platform allows you to use it in conjunction with other alternative solutions. For example, to provide direct access to files uploaded via FTP with separation of rights by account, as well as read correspondence in conjunction with UseNet and other protocols. But more on that in the following reviews.