Gopher Novice - Part V.

Cont. [Gopher Novice - Part IV].

The oldest content of the Gophersphere

Several days ago I've got the idea to search [Veronica] for some dates. I've chosen 1999 and the first result looked for a good luck. I thought then that it must be part of the oldest content of the Gophersphere. I've started to read that archives but there hadn't been written about Gopher at all. It was strange for me. After a while I've read author's about section, and there he had written:

I recall when both the web and gopher started, but never did get around to running a gopher site until a few years ago

The real first post on the Gophersphere was [2018/01/09]. Everything is clear now. There are many Phlogs which are re-published on Gophersphere. Other searches in Veronica hasn't been so successful. But I'm repeating them and try search the real oldest content of Gophersphere again.

Gophersphere Wayback Machine

My probing inside Veronica results has gave other interesting result. I've found [Snapshot of the gopherverse from 2007. Inspired by the Internet Archive Wayback Machine.]. As I've written before, I try to download Gopher archive via BitTorrent. The things are going slow. And here suddenly the mentioned discovery. Without need to download archive to my hard-disk I can browse it. Splendid.

I haven't done any interesting finds yet.

Creators of the Gophersphere

There aren't many people who are gather unique content in Gophersphere. One of such place is [Mateusz' gopher lair] where are much to explore. For example old adverts eg. [Who's keeping up with Commodore Advert]. We all want to relax with near to portable hardware like this! ;-)

Gopherchan

I've found also [Gopherchan]. There are no similar project in Geminispace yet.

The way of Gophersphere was used

I try to browse Wayback, articles like [Gopher FAQ] to figure out the way of Gophersphere was used in 90's. It's hard to say something about it. My posts on Mastodon with questions about this topic, are in most cases without any answers. It could be natural, because people who were using Gopher then probably don't use Mastodon now. I ran into "new" [Bob Alberti's Gopher Directory] described as "co-authors of Internet Gopher", with only one greeting entry. It's hard to track down people who are on Gopher since 90's (even on and off).

I start thinking about WWW. The situation is the same. There aren't many places which could tell the new comers how WWW were used in 90's, 2000's or 2010's. I don't remember what exactly I was doing before so called Web 2.0 period (with mostly read-only WWW). I don't remember my first e-commerce experience, and how it was working before e-commerce had became popular. WWW is changing so quickly, that we are loosing memories about it. The same thing happened to Gophersphere.

My imagination about 90's in Gophersphere is that it was mainly read only catalogue of some digitized archives, provided by big institutions without need of printing them. The most of users interactions could be done by mailing lists or USENET. I don't know if the idea of Phlog were known - because WWW's Blogs were popular in the second half of 90's. So what was the ordinary day of Gopher user? What sites were popular?

Probably after the big institutions were switching off their catalogs, or moving them into WWW, there weren't anything left in Gophersphere.

[Gopher Novice - Part IV]

[Veronica]

[2018/01/09]

[Snapshot of the gopherverse from 2007. Inspired by the Internet Archive Wayback Machine.]

[Mateusz' gopher lair]

[Gopherchan]

[Gopher FAQ]

[Bob Alberti's Gopher Directory]

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szczezuja.space CC BY-SA

V1.0 @ Thu 26 Aug 2021 11:03:11 PM CEST

V1.1 @ Mon 30 Aug 2021 06:09:18 PM CEST

tags: #gopher, #archive