gopher

"Gopher, which organizes content in folders rather than clickable links, grows faster than the Web in the early ‘90s and is its most direct Internet competitor. Educational institutions embrace Gopher, as do the U.S. Congress. Developed by Mark McCahill, Paul Lindner and Farhad Anklesaria from a Campus-Wide Information Service, Gopher is named both for the University of Minnosota mascot, and after “go for” meaning fetch. By 1993, the gopher developers are planning to add hyperlinks and even virtual reality features."

tell me your memories of this beloved green frend

i have no memories of particular gopher servers

i remember fingering a coke machine

that was what the early internet was like. one of the most exciting things you could do was finger coke machines.

I actually have some print outs of gopher email conversations. ffrom like 1995

In 1993, my dorm room has essentially modem-style terminal connections, but not yet ethernet so you could see text but not use NCSA Mosaic.

We used gopher quite a bit! It was pretty good! There was a small but interesting community, a search system (archie? veronica?) and direct integration into many schools' phone book systems so we could call up our friends in other schools.

As NCSA Mosaic and then Mozilla became ubiquitous, and as dial up internet service became available, it was quickly overrun.

we had a social room of terminals in the student union. THE EMAIL ROOM. MAybe I should bring this concept back

Terminal rooms, kinda like record stores. Places where I met lots of cool folks or had a lot of interesting conversation, and are basically now completely obsolete.

xps I think Archie was an FTP client?
I remember the terminal labs at university in the late 80s, and the Mac labs after that. Sometimes I’d be there at 3am and the same ash-white large guy would be on irc, subsisting on boxes of snacks. Rarely used gopher tho, like BBSes I didn’t quite get the point of browsing shared folders.

I remember using Gopher mainly to download software and zines like Jeff Dove's FUNHOUSE!, which prompted a lot of CD purchases.

https://users.polytech.unice.fr/~buffa/funhouse.html

now people see email as work and dont want to deal with it