Amer Neely
This may come as a surprise to some of you, but there's more to the Internet than the World Wide Web! "Huh?" you say. Yes friends, long before there was a Web there was something called gopherspace. It is very similar to browsing with a web-browser. In fact, some folks call it the poor-man's browser.
History
The Internet Gopher began life at the University of Minnesota. Paul Lindner and Mark P. McCahill and a team of programmers developed it in 1991 as a replacement for ftp and telnet. As with many useful utilities, it started out as a local service to allow students and school administration to access all the information generated by the various school departments. Since then, it has been adopted and absorbed by the Internet community at large. Although they are slowly being taken over by the Web, gopher sites still abound, and are well worth getting to know if you're seeking information quickly.
Overview
The first thing to know about gopher is that it is entirely text- based. That is, you won't see any graphics or images using gopher. This is a definite plus if you're in a hurry and wish to find information quickly, without waiting for graphic-intensive homepages to download.
Don't worry - you don't have to give up Windows to get to a gopher site. Only the display is text - not the method of accessing them or the resources you may find. In this article I'll assume you are using a PPP connection (Windows or Macintosh) since most users will not have a text-based shell account with access to gopher.
Secondly, there are only two types of resources on a gopher page - either a file or a directory containing more files, perhaps on a different gopher server. This makes navigating around a gopher site extremely quick, easy, and intuitive. If you're at all familiar with the tree structure of DOS-based computer files on a hard disk, then you will have no trouble visualizing a gopher site.
How do I access gopher?
The perceptive reader will remember my previous article about the World Wide Web. In it, I describe the "protocols" that can be used by a web browser to make a connection to other computers on the Internet. One of them is "gopher". What does this mean? Well, if you are in your favourite browser, and initiate the "Open" or "Go" command, instead of typing in "http://" and then some address, try typing in "gopher://gopher.well.sf.ca.us" (without the quotes). Your browser should connect you with the Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link's GopherSpace. All the navigation buttons still work in your browser (Back, Forward, etc). And clicking on a resource connects you with that resource. But the display of information is quite different.
You can also get yourself a copy of a Gopher client (program) that you run instead of your browser. This is the same as getting yourself a dedicated e-mail program instead of just using the e- mail feature of your web browser, if it has one. There are a handful available on the Internet at the TUCOWS mirror site.
The format of every gopher page looks basically the same as another - only the resources change. If you can read a list of choices from a menu, you can navigate with no problem through gopherspace. Yes, it's that simple. In general, moving through gopherspace is linear, as opposed to moving around the Web, which is non-linear.
What kinds of resources can I expect to find?
This format is ideal for presenting such types of information as lists, directories, databases, schedules, tables (text of course), indexes, and of course, documents of all kinds.
What about searching gopherspace?
Glad you asked! There are two search engines available to you. One is called Veronica and the other is called Jughead. I kid you not. Pretty soon there will be one called Betty (no just kidding). Archie is a distant cousin of Veronica - we'll discuss archie in a later article. Veronica is to gopherspace what archie is to ftp sites.
Veronica is one of those computer-geek acronyms which stands for Very Easy Rodent-Oriented Net-wide Index to Computerized Archives.
Veronica does its task by taking your search request, and search- ing all the gopher sites on the Internet for it. Then it builds an index of the results and voila - your results are presented as another gopher page. These results are available to you right away with the click of a mouse.
It's important to understand exactly what Veronica is searching in order to get the most from it. It doesn't search articles for the text you submit, rather it searches gopher menus. This would be akin to searching only for directory (folder) or file names on your hard drive, not the contents of files.
The tricky part of this is finding a Veronica server. One of them is at the University of Minnesota. Notice that there are choices for searching Directories or gopherspace.
Remember that directories are collections of resources, so in searching them for a key word, you will get different results than if you searched files for the same key word/s. If you choose to search all gopherspace, you are searching all types of resources, whose titles contain your specified search words. The resources may be of any Gopher data TYPE; e.g. ASCII documents, gopher directories, image files, binary files, etc.
Some points to remember about Veronica searching ...
There are other more advanced features of Veronica searching which are beyond the scope of this article, so you'll have to content yourself with these crumbs for now. If you would like more information on How To Query Veronica, try this link.
Saving the results of a search
Most gopher clients offer you the choice of either mailing the results of your quest to yourself (or someone else), or downloading (saving) it to your computer. Bookmark it!
Yes, just as you can bookmark a favourite or hard-to-find site in your web browser, you can add a particular gopher page to your bookmark file. This holds true whether you are using a web browser to surf gopherspace, or a dedicated gopher client.
You mentioned Jughead ...
OK, things are getting really weirded out here - Jughead? Ah, you mean Jonzy's Universal Gopher Hierarchy Excavation And Display. Named after Rhett Jones, who developed it in 1993 at the University of Utah. You use Veronica to search all of gopherspace - you use Jughead to search just ONE gopher site. Simple!
If you find a particular gopher site that you like, but don't want to wade through all its menus, this is where Jughead comes to the rescue.
Finding a Jughead server
Unless you find yourself at a gopher site with an entry like "Search all titles at University of Minnesota", you will have to find a Jughead server. How to do this? Why, using Veronica, of course! If you perform a search for "jughead -t7 -l" you should get a list of servers offering Jughead. The "-t7" and "-l" are some of those advanced search features I mentioned. (That's a lower-case ell, not the digit 1). The "-t7" limits your search to indices, and the "-l" tells Veronica to create a link file with all the addresses of the results.
That about does it for Gopher. In future articles we will talk about newsgroups, ftp and archie.
Have fun most of all and bcnu ...