Gopher Even More

Chapter 18

Gopher Even More

Many people consider Gopher to be the precursor to the World Wide Web. In many ways, it was. In today's Web-crazed world, however, Gopher has been almost forgotten. Don't be fooled. A lot of good information is still out there on Gopher, and in this lesson, I intend to help you find it.

In this lesson, you find the answers to the following questions:

• What is Gopher and how does it work?
• How do I find Gophers?
• What do Gopher sites look like?
• What type of information can I find on Gopher?
• What are some examples of Gopher information?
• How is Gopher different from the WWW?

Although you can find Gopher clients, such as WSGopher for Windows and TurboGopher for Macintosh, they are rarely used anymore. Browsers such as Netscape and Internet Explorer can access and use the information on Gopher well.

Is Gopher Just Another Rodent?

Besides being a cute little animal and the mascot for the University of Minnesota, a Gopher is another type of site on the Net that is full of information. In fact, it's no accident that this type of Internet site bears the name of this northern university's mascot.

Gopher was originally developed at the University of Minnesota in the 1980s to solve a particular campus computing problem. A typical large university, U of M contained many departments with many files that different people needed to share and access. They still needed to make this information easy to access and controllable by each department, however.

Enter Gopher. A system was developed whereby many types of information could be displayed and accessed in a simple, menu-based structure, as shown in Figure 18.1. In fact, the University of Minnesota defines a Gopher as "software following a simple protocol for tunneling through a TCP/IP internet."

Figure 18.1.

The Mother of all Gophers is located at the University of Minnesota's site (gopher://gopher.micro.umn.edu).

For the first time ever, users could access useful information by selecting menu items that were actually in English (if you can imagine that). Soon others saw the usefulness of this helpful system.

Where Should You Start?

A great place to start using Gopher is actually at the University of Minnesota's Gopher site. Also at Minnesota's Gopher is a directory with links to practically every Gopher server in the world. You can locate it at the following URL:

gopher://gopher.tc.umn.edu:70/11/Other%
20Gopher%20and%20Information%20Servers

Time Saver: If typing in a URL like the preceding one gives you goose bumps, you can go about it in an easier way. From U of M's Top Level Gopher at gopher://gopher.micro.umn.edu, simply click the Other Gopher And Information Servers link and make a guidemark for the resulting page shown in Figure 18.2. This way, you can save a lot of typing.

Figure 18.2.

Your link to the entire world of Gopher starts at the University of Minnesota.

As you can see, this Gopher gives you the opportunity to go to an alphabetical listing of every Gopher server in the world. In addition, you can look at Gopher servers by region or even conduct a search for and of different Gopher servers worldwide.

What's Gopher Really Like?

You already know that Gopher sites consist of menus that contain information, but what are some of the specifics involved in navigating Gopherspace? The first thing you need to do is learn how to recognize when you're using Gopher.

New Term: Gopherspace: Gopherspace is simply the term used to describe the portion of the Internet that contains Gopher sites. It is one of cyberspace's subdivisions, if you will.

If you're navigating the Internet using a Web browser, you may not always realize when you've left the Web and entered Gopherspace. You can look for a couple of telltale signs.

First, if you have your browser display the location, you can see that a Gopher site's location begins with gopher://. Second, notice the line-by-line menu structure for which Gopher is known. Gopher sites can often look similar to FTP sites in a browser, but just remember that FTP menu items rarely consist of English words and headings.

Burrowing in Gopher

Navigating Gopherspace using a Web browser is easy. In fact, it's really no different from navigating the Web. Every menu item in Gopher appears as a hyperlink in your browser. Simply click a menu item to proceed to the next one.

Much like links on the Web, Gopher links can take you to many different types of resources. Depending on what browser you use, these different links are preceded by an icon or a word to indicate what types of resources the link points to. Table 18.1 gives a breakdown of common Gopher links.

Table 18.1. Common Gopher links.

As a rule, links to Gopher menus simply take you to other Gopher pages; links to image, movie, sound, or text files are treated as such links would be treated on the Web, as are searches and Telnet sessions. (Look at Lesson 19, "Telnet to the Internet," for more details on Telnet.) Keep in mind, though, that a Search link in Gopherspace generally searches only Gopher sites and other databases, not the Web.

What's on the Menu?

Just as navigating in Gopher is similar to finding your way around the Web, the file and directory structure of Gopher is similar to that found on FTP sites. (See Lesson 17, "Getting Files with FTP," for details.) Briefly, every Gopher site has a Top Level menu such as the one shown in Figure 18.1. Each one of these menus then acts as its own "top level" menu for the menus below it.

One major difference, however, does exist between Gopher and FTP directory structure. Whereas FTP directories can lead only to other subdirectories and files, Gopher directories can lead to subdirectories and files, as well as search engines, databases, Telnet sessions, Web sites, FTP sites, and other Gopher sites. For a simple example of Gopher menu structure, look at Figure 18.3.

Figure 18.3.

The tree-like structure of a Gopher menu can lead you almost anywhere.

Just like with FTP, most of your navigation in Gopher consists of clicking hyperlinks and using the Back and Forward navigation buttons frequently.

What Can You Find on Gopher?

I mentioned at the beginning of this lesson that a lot of useful information really is available via Gopher. If you burrow around Gopher, you will begin to find some of the menus and files that make Gopher a good source of information to this day.

As you will learn in Lesson 20, "Finding People, Places, and Things on the Net," you can search Gopherspace using Veronica to find even more information on Gopherspace. In addition, in the following sections I show you a couple of the resources to which Gopher can give you easy access.

Using Gopher to Telnet

As you will learn in Lesson 19, by using Telnet, you can connect directly to other computers on the Internet.

One thing you won't learn in that lesson, however, is one particularly easy way to find some of the most useful Telnet sites on the Net, as you learn next. Gopher is an excellent resource for locating public access Telnet sites on the Internet. Foremost among these sites are libraries. Many large libraries have their card catalogs and holdings available for searching on the Internet. These libraries, with the help of Gopher and Telnet, can offer you a wealth of information.

To Do: Telnetting

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Time Saver: Notice that most libraries have both a Telnet session link and a file link for each library. Reading a library's accompanying text file to get any specific login directions before using the site itself is always a good idea.

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Figure 18.4 shows how your Web browser automatically brings up the appropriate application to get you into just about any library you want. Before going on, you may want to browse around the MSU MAGIC online library for a while. On your way to finding this library, notice that you passed hundreds more. MSU MAGIC online library is a great place to start if you need to do library research of any kind.

Figure 18.4.

When it comes to Telnet, you need two applications to get connected.

Gopher Jewels

As you now know, Gopherspace consists of millions of interconnected menus and files. What you may not know is that another attempt has been made to make Gopher sites accessible by topic in an effort to reduce the necessity for complex searches and following dead-end links.

This topical organization of Gopherspace is accomplished by Gopher Jewels, a system maintained at the University of Southern California. Getting to Gopher Jewels is easy. From gopher://cwis.usc.edu, click Other Gophers and Information Resources and then click Gopher-Jewels. You then see a screen like the one pictured in Figure 18.5.

Spend a little time exploring these topical menus. Notice that each submenu enables you to jump to a previous menu or search Gopher Jewels. This capability gives you one more way to use Gopher powerfully and efficiently.

Figure 18.5.

Gopher Jewels offers topical access to Gopherspace.

Gopher Examples, Please?

You now have several different ways to explore much of the useful information that is on Gopher. Before you're done, though, perhaps you would like to see a few examples of Gopher in action.

How's the Weather?

Gopher provides a lot of information on the latest in weather, including satellite pictures of recent weather in different areas, as well as complete forecasts. Probably the best place to find current weather forecasts is the Gopher site at Michigan State University.

To Do: Checking the Weather

From here, you can go in one of many directions: