## State Of Gopher State Of Gopher by Christoph Lohmann <20h@r-36.net> ## Gopher Anthem Minnesota, hats off to thee, to thy colors, true we shall ever be. Firm and strong, united are we. Rah! Rah! Rah! for Ski-U-Mah, Rah! Rah! Rah! Rah! Rah for the U of M! Rah for the U of M! ## Gopher Anthem Minnesota, hats off to thee, to thy colors, true we shall ever be. Firm and strong, united are we. Rah! Rah! Rah! for Ski-U-Mah, Rah! Rah! Rah! Rah! Rah for the U of M! Rah for the U of M! ## Gopher Anthem M-I-N-N-E-S-O-T-A! Minnesota! Minnesota! Yeeeeeeaaaaaaaah ... GOPHERS!!! ## Veronica Statistics 2017: 133 gopher servers, 4.9 mio. unique selectors 2018: 260 gopher servers, 3.7 mio. unique selectors 2019: 320 gopher servers, 4.2 mio. unique selectors 2020: 395 gopher servers, 4.5 mio. unique selectors 2021: 361 gopher servers, 6.0 mio. unique selectors 2022: 325 gopher servers, 5.0 mio. unique selectors Sadly servers were lost. ## Gopher Lawn Stats Up from 2021 to 2022 by two entries. All maintainers are welcome, it is very easy. git://bitreich.org/gopher-lawn ## Tildeverse * tildeverse.org | we're a loose association of like-minded tilde communities. if you're | interested in learning about *nix (linux, unix, bsd, etc) come check out our | member tildes and sign up! % printf "/\r\n" | nc tildeverse.org 70 | grep "^h" \ | grep website | sort | uniq | wc -l 36 Up by nine from last year! ## Gopher is at a steady state. Despite individual servers going away, content is created. Unique content is created. ## Gopher is your daily protocol. With gopher supported everywhere, I at least, end up with a mix of gopher and https every day. The protocol distinctions are simply gone. ## Bitreich Services See the State of Bitreich Talk. * Ideas Project * Bithub for intellectual porn * Bitreich TV * Meme service * The Lawn * Friendless Network * Snowmen Project * Onion Initiative ## Bitreich Services * Meme University * Dance Academy * XML Strip Club * Tutorials Project * VLA movement * Penis Extension Service * Bitreich OneLine for free gopherspace trial codes * Kiosk ## Bitreich Services * Dating * BitLeeks * BitLeaks * OnlyFans * Pilot Service * Cancelman Hiring Service * Empty the Fridge Service * Digitalisation Addicts Anonymous ## Bitreich Services * Conferencing System * Stop Scrum * The Gopher Times * BitTwiddle * Gameroom * BitreichNFT * Gopher Vulture Standard * Gopher Blue Seal * T-R-U-S-T programme * ... Extending more, based on daily input. ## Bitreich Services We are reaching a point, where it is impossible for one member to know all services available. Which is good. This removes boredom. ## Gopher Vulture Standard The web is lying to you, gopher is not. .-'`\-,/^\ .-. .-. /^\,-/`'-. / | \ ( ee\ __ __ /aa ) / | \ | | |__/,--.`"` `, ,' `"`.--,\__| | | | / .__/ `"""",/ \,""""` \__. \ | | / / | | \ \ | .'.-' /__/ GOPHER VULTURE \__\ '-. '. `"`| |';-;_` `_;-;'| |`"` jgs |/ /-)))))) ((((((-\ \| ## The Gopher Vulture Standard Gopher is lonely and needs to evolve towards new standards of robbing people off their dignity, personal rights and sanity. There is no way to make money off gopher and advertising YET. Gopher Vulture is here to provide you with a standard for FULL EXPLOITATION of all of your users for the gain of your bank account and your dogs. ## The Gopher Vulture Standard If you introduce Gopher Vulture to your gopherhole, users are required to send in one body part in a cooling box right to your front door. This will prove that they are rightfully willing to participate in the experience you are providing them over gopher. The contract is signed with blood. No further procedure needed. After this contract signing you can exploit the users as you like. No restrictions, like filthy EU data laws, apply. ## The Gopher Vulture Standard See what Meta and Mozilla have done so far: https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/privacy-preserving-attribution-for-advertising/ ## Blue Gopher Seal The Blue Gopher Seal is a label that the product using it * is ispirational * saves resources * is energy efficient * allows you to see its source code * can be reused to anyone's pleasure gopher://bitreich.org/1/blue-gopher Maybe we can spread the seal more? ## Goals reached so far. Some goals have been reached so far: * Gopher is established and known as simple protocol. * Gopher is revived, is living and has an alive community. * New ideas flourish on gopher, which means it has a bright future. * Gopher support is in the major commandline tools and libraries. * Today we are holding the seventh conference on gopher! We can be proud of ourselves! ## Keeping the Flow: Looking back. Many things have been done before, but did not succeed due to their chance in history. https://www.jumpjet.info/Offbeat-Internet/Gopher/Repository/GopherCon/gc.htm I will give glimpse ideas of what people were doing back then, to give us inspiration for how to improve the gopher experience (and avoid the failures of the past). Let us together look back! ## Keeping the Flow. https://www.jumpjet.info/Offbeat-Internet/Gopher/Repository/\ GopherCon/GC94/Presentations/GEN1=1994_State_of_the_Gopher.txt Client software architectures -It will always be a multi-protocol world -Monolithic network applications have limited future -A monolithic application is a large, cumbersome swiss-army knife (would you repair your car or build a house with a swiss army knife?) -Small, specialized, communicating applications will have an advantage The fall of browsers? ## Keeping the Flow Future Architecture -Many application protocols, and continued protocol development -Modular protocol-specific client software which plugs into a user-interface framework -Many network-aware page description languages that work with plug-in protocol modules -We should be trying to do a few things really well instead of everything poorly The rise of gopher frontends? ## Keeping the Flow Why 3-D gopherspace? -People navigate through 3-D space all the time -Providing a stronger sense of place and better landmarks will help users navigate -Virtual worlds (3-D gopherspace) gives us more possibilities for visual and aural cues that documents are closely (or distantly) related The metaverse on gopher? ## Keeping the Flow ...why 3-D Gopherspace? -Social intelligence cues can easily be coded into 3-D space... popular items might appear worn and the beaten path can be made explicit -We need to facilitate both finding information and finding people -A new user interface metaphor will let us build richer systems that incorporate interpersonal interaction (imagine hybrid Gopher / IRC / MUD systems) Annna? Our IRC system? ## Keeping the Flow But is this really feasible? -3-D gopherspace does not have to be a network pig -We can trade intelligence in the client for bandwidth; the client generates the scenes itself -Affordable desktop systems (PowerPC/Pentium) are now becoming fast enough to render virtual worlds on the fly -...And it is worth doing because virtual worlds will give us better metaphors for describing the massive quantity of resources on the net Memes? ## Keeping the Flow https://www.jumpjet.info/Offbeat-Internet/Gopher/Repository/\ GopherCon/GC94/Presentations/EQ1=Information_Quality.txt What do we want the information to do for us ? What we really need is not information, but knowledge. We need people to expand their knowledge of the world, and we want our kids to be able to be better citizens in the future. The UNIX philosophy? ## Keeping the Flow https://www.jumpjet.info/Offbeat-Internet/Gopher/Repository/\ GopherCon/GC93/GopherCon_%2793_Trip_Report.txt Gopher Front-Ends to Databases (Paul Lindner): A number of efforts have taken place to integrate both relational and flat-file databases with Gopher. Two basic methods are common: a "shadow" system, in which reports are generated from the database and moved into Gopherspace, and on-line access to an interactive query engine. Paul plans to work toward integrated Gopher support of one flat-file db (DBase is the most popular) and one generic SQL db. A simple dcgi script in geomyidae! ## Sidenote: Keeping the Flow https://www.jumpjet.info/Offbeat-Internet/Gopher/Repository/\ GopherCon/GC93/GopherCon_%2793_Trip_Report.txt NEW GOPHER USES AND TOOLS: unless otherwise specified, any tools mentioned here are said to be available in the archives on boombox.micro.umn.edu. Gmail/gmailcal (Prentiss Riddle, Rice University): a mail-to-gopherspace gateway with an accompanying events calendar manager. Anyone wants to sue Gmail? ## Keeping the Flow https://www.jumpjet.info/Offbeat-Internet/Gopher/Repository/\ GopherCon/GC95/Papers/ScreenScrape.txt ScreenScraping for Fun & Profit ... If you have legacy systems (like the web!) that are not going to migrate to client/server technology anytime soon, you may want to apply these techniques to free your data without creating a shadow database system. ... Modifying this system to use client-server would require a complete redesign. It would be more economical to start from scratch. Instead, we designed software that allows students to view information from the system using Gopher. By doing this we saved many students from the need to find and configure special software to start a (web browser). The same situation of today, but now from web to gopher. ## Keeping the Flow https://www.jumpjet.info/Offbeat-Internet/Gopher/Repository/\ GopherCon/GC95/Papers/Cluster.txt The cluster software should definitely use a better algorithm. We've had good results with the current one, but don't have that gut level feeling that the math is entirely theoretically correct. The reason why 3D is not moving? ## Keeping the Flow https://www.jumpjet.info/Offbeat-Internet/Gopher/Repository/\ GopherCon/GC93/GopherCon_%2793_Trip_Report.txt ACROBAT DEMO: Gary Cosimini of Adobe gave a talk on a very interesting forthcoming product called Acrobat ... PDF ... If it catches on this would be a good candidate for a Gopher data type and could solve many document incompatibility problems. This has been achieved in modern gopher times! ## Thinking ahead? https://www.jumpjet.info/Offbeat-Internet/Gopher/Repository/\ GopherCon/GC95/Papers/Hyper-G.txt The client-server protocol of Hyper-G is a connection oriented protocol instead of a connectionless protocol as implemented in Gopher or WWW. This allows it to implement user access rights and billing mechanisms in Hyper-G. The Hyper-G server itself is based on a distributed network database architecture with separated database engines for documents and hyperlinks. Using this concept the whole world of Hyper-G servers presents itself to the user as one large single database with no need to know server addresses to access single servers. The server structure is completely hidden to the user. Facebook? ## Summary from 1992 https://www.jumpjet.info/Offbeat-Internet/Gopher/Repository/\ GopherCon/GC92/GopherCon_%2792_Trip_Report.txt OVERVIEW BY THE GOPHER DEVELOPERS: The conference began with an overview by Mark McCahill and Farhad Anklesaria, two members of the Gopher Team at Minnesota. I liked their summary of the two initial goals for Gopher: -- To provide the plumbing for a great CWIS. -- To be "Internet duct tape" for connecting a wide variety of networked services. Although many of us at the conference tended to be driven by the demand for one or the other of these, ultimately they go together nicely. ## Keeping the Flow Summary The gopher history and archives give us ideas of the past, which fit to the present. #pause We can reuse this and adapt it to modern technology easily. See the memes and AI on annna. #pause There is so much to do on gopher, which is unique. #pause Everyone is invited to this adventure! ## Keeping the Flow Summary Gopher is alive. #pause Gopher has so many ideas. #pause Learning from the past will make us duct-tape gopher to new technology. #pause Gopher is here to stay. ## Thanks Thank you for listening! If you have further comments, contact me at Christoph Lohmann <20h@r-36.net>