When I saw the article in Google Reader, I had already clicked “mark as read” before going, “…what?” and hastily going back to see if I’d read what I thought I’d read.
Ars Technica has a piece on the Overbite Project, an open-source effort to bring the Gopher format to modern computers which already has an alpha release for Android devices.
Gopher is the hypertext network protocol that was in use before the development of the World Wide Web. I still remember using it back at college in the early ‘90s to find information on the ‘net—mostly e-books such as The Haunted Bookshop by Christopher Morley, or sample chapters of Del Rey paperbacks.
Yes, that’s right: there is an effort underway to modernize a network protocol that was last used to any great extent nearly twenty years ago—an eternity in “Internet time”. But the developers think that the low-bandwidth, textual nature of the format would make it perfect for use on mobile devices.
"Frankly, I think that Gopher’s niche in the future may be in the mobile space," [lead developer Cameron Kaiser] told me in an e-mail. "Rather than coming up with things like WAP, why not go with a protocol that already exists, is simple to implement, is not constrained by licensing, and already has content out there to peruse? Particularly for feature phones and the like, the menus that service providers foist on users as ‘the Internet’ are pretty much the same things Gopher offered in 1993!"
Personally, I think it may be about ten years too late—Gopher would have been great during the heyday of “dumb” phone web browsing, but now a lot of people are moving to smartphones which offer full graphical capability. Why would anyone want to go back to a textual interface with those?
Still, the Internet is made up of people working on projects that a lot of other people can’t see any use in. And a lot of those projects turn out to be more useful than their critics would have imagined. So who knows? Maybe it really is almost time for Gopher to pop back out of its hole.
I only recently had a conversation where I tried to explain to someone that I was on the internet before the World Wide Web was invented. Their eyes glazed over as I tried to explain Gopher and Archie to them. It made me feel soooo old 🙂
And it isn’t even April 1. This is too funny.
Ah. I remember Gopher semi-fondly. Installed a gopher server to replace a DEC Videotext based service back in the early 90’s. Fortunately, managing the actual content was someone else’s responsibility.
Gopher is fast. Blazing, blazing, fast. That’s in part because it is text only.
Perfect for reading. Perfect for getting news.
Terrible for ads.
And since the internet is now a wholly commercial enterprise, Gopher is going nowhere.
Alas.