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To: Alamo-Girl
Before there was a World Wide Web, there was "gopher space" and "gopher tunnels". The WWW was inspired by the gopher world, and expanded on the concepts. The gopher protocol was very simple -- the servers would manage pages that were either menus, or text pages. Navigation consisted of going from menu to menu to menu to get to the data you were looking for.

There used to be a variety of gopher clients available, but most people accessed the gophers by telneting to a Unix shell account and running a client local to the server.

Out of nostalgia and curiosity, I spent some time nosing around to see if there were still any gopher sites up and running. It seems like there aren't many left. I did finally find a list of "All the Gopher Servers in the World" from http://www.alabanza.com/kabacoff/Inter-Links/gophers.html (all the other gopher servers from that page are dead.)

The root at that site is "Gopher root at gopher.tc.umn.edu" in case anyone is curious. It has a search page (there were lots of gopher search utilities back in the protocol's heyday), and has menu items for other search and index sites.

Why do I mention this here?

Because as I was nosing around, it suddenly occurred to me that a global network of servers (albeit sparse) might be something that some unsavory characters might find convenient. IOW, there might be some stuff of interest there, "hidden in plain sight" as it were.

This may be a lode of unexplored territory.

If anyone feels like exploring, the link above would be a good starting point. Don't be surprised (or discouraged) if most of the gophers are dead.

Internet Explorer supports the gopher protocol. I don't know if "Brand N" does, or if any of the other alternative browsers do. I think Lynx supports it, but don't quote me on that. And there may still be a gopher client or two available for download from tucows or some FTP site somewhere.

39 posted on 11/17/2001 1:54:57 AM PST by Don Joe
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To: Don Joe
Thank you so much for the lead on gopher! I'm verrry curious if there any strange messages like we've uncovered here...
46 posted on 11/17/2001 6:30:25 AM PST by Alamo-Girl
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