# goms = gopher gems // 19-2-26

Today I found some minutes to browse^Wdig through gopherspace,
and I stumbled over [developer's phlog][1] on SDF.
Looks like yet another soul out there I can relate with! ^-^

I had a very similar [learning][2] experience when getting
into Linux. I also started with Slackware -- yay! -- and
now remember the `darkstar:` prompt as well! However, I got
the system on a CD, because at that time, I was working for
my PhD at [PSI]( http://www.psi.ch ) and one of our lab
technicians gave me a Slackware CD, which I installed on an
old desktop PC (probably with a 286) from my father's office.
Later on, I got into Debian with the help of some very nice
people at [Fix.no]( http://www.fix.no ) and finally could
even write my thesis in LaTeX on that machine.
I also remember those were the days I had a small Sun
workstation (Sparc, probably) with Solaris as my own
personal machine at the institute, and could run a small
mailserver on it and directly send and receive e-mail there.

My first contact with the command line world was through
MS-DOS, though. At the end of my gymnasium (college?) years,
I bought a SHARP PC-3100 (which was a [PC-3000][3] with 2MB
of RAM) and had a C compiler as well as Perl (I guess some
version 3) on it, and uemacs or something similar as editor.
(No, at that time I was in the EMACS section of the world,
not vi/ed.) I wrote my diploma thesis on that thing later
on while at university, in pure TeX which I could transfer
with Kermit through RS-232 and a terminal server onto the
central HP server (an Alliant, IIRC) which had some HP Unix
and the entire TeX toolbox.
The PC-3100 died some years ago with some hardware issues,
a sad moment!

In those years (early 90's), gopherspace was still used by
commercial entities -- I especially remember the site of
Spiegel.de which I read daily.
Unfortunately, they only have bloated webstuff with
paywall today...

On developer's site, I found a link to [Fritterware][4],
and that's an interesting experiment in making RSS feeds
available on gopher. I'll certainly will try that a bit
in the coming days!

developer also has a nice post about [Degoolagization][5]
of an Android phone. I did not yet try F-Droid or similar
systems, I have to admit, but at least I banned/suppressed
Goolag Play&Co as much as possible from my (very cheap)
smartphone.

.:.

[1]: gopher://sdf.org:70/1/users/developer/PHLOG
[2]: gopher://sdf.org:70/0/users/developer/PHLOG/learning.txt
[3]: gopher://gopherpedia.com/0/Sharp%20PC-3000
[4]: gopher://fritterware.org:70/1/
[5]: gopher://sdf.org:70/0/users/developer/PHLOG/degoolag.txt