What is Gopher? (in an internet context )
Gopher is a protocol system, which in advance of the World Wide Web,
allowed server based text files to be hierarchically organised and
easily viewed by end users who accessed the server using Gopher
applications on remote computers. Initially Gopher browsers could only
display text-based files before developments such as HyperGopher, which
were able to handle simple graphic formats though they were never used
on a widespread basis as by this time the World Wide Web and its
Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) were gaining in popularity, and had
similar and more extensive functions.
The origins of the Gopher protocol
The Gopher protocol and original Gopher viewer application were first
developed at the University of Minnesota in the early 1990’s as part of
the drive to make use of the Internet to enable the simple sharing of
documents with people who could be located in institutions on opposite
sides of the country or even the world, and to have those documents
organised so that similar / related pages would be easily accessible.
The value of the Gopher system was enhanced by the development of two
systems known as Veronica and Jughead which allowed a user to search
across resources stored in Gopher file hierarchies on a global basis. As
for the naming of the system, the University of Minnesota sports teams
were called the ‘Golden Gophers’ and the sports mascot was thus a large
gopher, it has been said that the protocol was named in honour of the
mascot, and also as in an assistant who's sent to ‘go for’ things.
What happened to it?
By the mid 1990s the World Wide Web was growing at a huge rate, and
given that the Web’s Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) and its browser
Mosaic could match the functions of the Gopher protocol and additionally
offer added functions such as hyper linking from within HTML files
which brought together related pages more efficiently than Gopher, there
was no longer a compelling reason to choose the Gopher system. Another
advantage the early Web had over Gopher was the decision of the
University of Minnesota not to definitively rule out the option of
exercising its intellectual property rights over the Gopher protocol,
for any other organisation deciding whether to devote time, effort, and
expense to adopting one of the systems the possibility of getting locked
into a technology that they could then find themselves being charged
for was good reason to prefer the World Wide Web. Most of the files and
databases that had been available on Gopher were converted into HTTP
compatible formats and made available on the Web, though for the
interested it is still possible to access the Gopher root directory at
the University of Minnesota and a few other places, but the vast
majority of the other Gopher servers on the Net have since gone offline.
0 comments:
Post a Comment