Gopher est un protocole né en 1991, à l’époque où on a fait les fondations pour que le hacking soit embedded pour toujours. Son nom, dérivé de “go for” (littéralement va chercher), inspiré par l’écureuil spermophile qui creuse des dédales de galeries. Il permet de consulter une arborescence de ressources, et fonctionne en mode caractère, mais a rapidement été renversé par le succès d’HTTP qui était libre – contrairement à Gopher pour lequel l’université du Minnesota menaçait de réclamer des royalties.
eh oui!
Il est toujours possible de consulter la racine gopher://gopher.floodgap.com/ (mise à jour régulièrement) cependant seuls Firefox/Gecko, IE Mac (et Lynx) implémentent encore Gopher. Pour un magnifique exemple de page simulant les phases de la Lune.
On peut voir du texte ou du ASCII art comme ces phases lunaires mais aussi une photo:
gopher://sdf.lonestar.org/I9/norden/NATIONAL.JPG
Pour utiliser ce protocole, quel web-navigateur ou soft?
gopher://gopher.floodgap.com/0/gopher/wbgopher
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You're in the year 1991, when University of Minnesota computer scientists, fed up with the limitations of FTP for downloading files and the overhead of having to log into computers for everything, decided to come up with a friendlier method of accessing data over the then largely vacant and much smaller Internet. The result was Gopher, a simple and easy to understand menu system that allowed once hideously complicated systems and services to be strung together for straightforward usage. And Gopher Was Good. In fact, Gopher was so good that for several years, Gopher sites sprang up all over. You could get weather reports on Gopher, news, mailing lists, even software. Then Mosaic came out barely a year or so later and plunged the world into "darkness" and all seemed lost under the choking strands of the World Wide Web. And Gopherspace lay all but forgotten. But Gopher's still out there. And what's more, you'll find it surprisingly useful, even years after the Web became a household word. Why? * It's easy to set up. * It doesn't need much system power to run -- either from the server or from your computer. Very old or ancient computer (with ethernet) is still OK * It supports many things that the Web does, even if it looks less attractive. You can still view images, search and download programs, and ... * ... since Gopher has less data to transfer, it's frequently faster. * Most Gopher servers are governmental or research/educational, meaning lots of Gopher sites are usually more informative than Web sites on the same kinds of topics. Serveur mac: gopher://gopher.meulie.net/11/gopher/Mac_server gopher://gopher.meulie.net/00/gopher/Macintosh-TurboGopher/00README
