Gopher

August 92: The GopherCon conference
News: The newsgroup alt.gopher

The following release info is out of date...

(From mail - thanks to Peter Flynn for passing it on)

Version 1.1 of the PC Gopher client is now [Sep 91] available by anonymous FTP from boombox.micro.umn.edu in the directory pub/gopher/PC_client/version_1.1

About Gopher:

The Internet Gopher is a distributed document delivery service. It allows a neophyte user to access various types of data residing on multiple hosts in a seamless fashion. This is accomplished by presenting the user a hierarchical arrangement of documents and by using a client-server communications model. In addition to browsing through hierarchies of documents, gopher users can submit queries to gopher search servers. The search servers typically have full-text indexes for a set of gopher documents; the responce to a query is a list of documents that matched the search criteria.

Internet Gopher servers accept simple queries (sent over a TCP connection), and respond by sending the client a document or a list of documents. Since this is a distributed protocol there can be many servers... but the client software hides this fact from the user. We currently use this technology at the University of Minnesota to help support microcomputer users... a couple of gopher servers have 6000-7000 computer Q&A items that users can search for answers to their questions. In addition, there are also gopher servers with recipes and other fun stuff.

The PC Gopher client runs on most networked PCs, but requires that you have loaded the appropriate Clarkson packet driver for your network ethernet card. The PC gopher software has a TurboVision user interface so both keyboard and mouse are supported... and you don't need to run MS Windows.

If you want more information about the Gopher protocol, you can anonymous FTP to boombox.micro.umn.edu and look in the /pub/gopher directory tree. Currently there are gopher clients for Mac, PC and Unix (curses-based) available from the University of Minnesota. The University of St. Thomas wrote a NeXT gopher client available for anonymous ftp from cs.stthomas.edu (140.209.5.1) directory gopher, file Gopher_1.0b.tar.Z (51605 bytes).

Note that you can also access the gopher system via telnet sessions to consultnat.micro.umn.edu (log in as "gopher").

You can subscribe to a mailing list for announcemnets of new gopher servers and software by sending a request to: gopher-news-request@boombox.micro.umn.edu

You can send e-mail to the gopher development team at:

gopher@boombox.micro.umn.edu

Mark P. McCahill distributed computing cowboy

___________________________________________________________________________

mpm@boombox.micro.umn.edu (612) 625-1300

Computer & Information Services University of Minnesota

100 Union St. SE

Minneapolis. MN 55455 fax: (612) 625-6817