I found this map by accident while telling someone what the internet was like before the advent of HTTP. Behold Matt Owen’s handiwork!
And for those who can’t see it…
I have to suspect it’s due to the name, and how long it’s been up. As you can see from the diagram not a lot actually links to there. I think it may also seem like a more ‘significant’ site than it really is, as I put the MSPL documents on there.
And to add to even more Gopher madness, he’s written an excellent client! You can find it here: http://www.jaruzel.com/gopher/gopher-client-browser-for-windows
I have to say that first impressions are pretty great. Although looking at the page makes me realize just how much is broken, and cruft. Kind of a sad state I’ve ended up in, since I moved my BBS to VMware, where the disk subsequently corrupted beyond hope. I don’t know if many ever used it, but I guess out of spite of my NT 3.1 VM still being operational, I ought to. Just as I probably should move my blog back to a machine I own to get it fully under my control as the outsourcing thing has really been volatile this year.
Speaking of gopher, there is even a gopher app on the MS Store, aptly titled Simple Gopher Client, by Shipwreck Software.
Although it follows in the tradition of every click getting it’s own pane type client, which does make going through your history easier ,but it ends up looking a bit cluttered. I preferred the ‘web browser’ type paradigm myself, but by the time that became common place, that HTTP thing took off, seeing it was not only entirely free, but the fine folks over at Mosaic had added inline images.
There are some pleroma instance (an ActivityPub federated microblog) that has gopher service enabled, for example, gopher://miniwa.moe:9999/
Strange it doesn’t render on many clients. I guess the non standard port doesn’t help at all.
On the otherhand I just found out about RetroZilla, so that’s great! Thanks!
RetroZilla looks really cool. Looks like there are SeaMonkey binaries, but if you want Firefox, you get to build it yourself. Fortunately Firefox 2 is kind of straightforward to build with Visual C++ 6.
In terms of your gopher popularity, here’s some numbers:
gopher://gopher.floodgap.com:70/1/world/search-hosts?com%20net%20info%20land%20org
old good Netscape 1.00N does render that site well in otvdm in win7 x64 here.
Man, your Gopher node is up, and that’s great!
But your BBS is down! I’ve tried to telnet to bbs.superglobalmegacorp.com a couple of times, with no luck. I was expecting to see some shiny ASCII art, and my hopes were deceived…
P. S. It looks like OverbiteFF gopher extension to SeaMonkey doesn’t allow outbound connections to non-gopher ports (e. g.: 9999).
Yeah I have to fix it…. I’ve been trying to recover the vmware image but I’ll just have to use an old backup.
Or rebuild
OS/2 2.00 is crazy old.
Hey there! Many thanks for the kind words about my Gopher Client and my Gopher maps. To clear things up – the larger the ‘blob’ your site has is based on how many selectors you have, and therefore in theory more content.
I should really do an updated map for 2020.
Cheers once again !
– Matt/Jaruzel
Ah that makes sense. I was pretty surprised to see myself on there.
It’s be interesting to see if gopher space is collapsing or rising. Its almost become a dark web of its own by now.
Hey Jason! You are not
able on gopherspace? /J. Cleese/
John Cleese?
I’m out at a bar at the moment I’ll have to investigate later