Simon Britton

Gopher!

Never heard of Gopher?

It's system or service that pre-dates the World Wide Web for organizing and displaying files on Internet servers, and was developed at the University of Minnesota and named after the school's mascot.

You can view Gopher from any web browser here, and if your browser supports the Gopher protocol (Firefox for example [as of July 2009!]), you can click the link at the top of that page to enter "Gopherspace".
Looks a bit plain doesn't it? Remove yourself for a moment from Facebook, Youtube, Twitter and bear in mind that the internet was, and still is a resource for obtaining information, and to do this, all you need is text and any accompanying images and the ability to download. Gopher is exactly this.
Next time you need to know how frequent your local train service is, what's on at the cinema, or the origins of the words "overkill", do you really need to view a webpage full of adverts, javascript and CSS includes, graphics and Flash banners to find this information?

To quote the Floodgap (a Popular gopher server) introduction page - :

Welcome to Gopherspace!

With one click of your browser you've just taken several years back in
Internet time. Close your eyes and grip your terminal. Imagine there's
no Websites (it's easy if you try). Imagine that there's a Commodore 64
on your desk, or maybe a 386.

Now open them again.

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's easy to write content for and facilitates organization.
* It doesn't need much system power to run -- either from the server or
  from your computer. It can run on systems with little CPU power or memory.
* 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.

Aside: check out the content of the google ads at the bottom - seems they haven't heard of it either :)

You can contact Simon Britton here.