Re: good gopher article by Cory Doctorow

[Paul Lindner <lindner@inuus.com>]

Hi Jacob!

Back then you'd have a text file with all the FTP sites, telnet sites, Muds or even BBSs) 

Often you'd download them off a USENET newsgroup.  Then you'd use a command line.. 

Not easy for a casual user.

So yes, you'd get a default server often set by the organization that brought you online.

You could enter a hostname/port combination, not quite as elegant as a URL.  (See

https://happymacs.wordpress.com/tag/turbogopher/ for an example of setting

the default and navigating to a new server)

All early Gopher clients had bookmarks so you could easily keep track.  In fact some gopher

clients would default to your bookmarks on startup.

On Mon, Feb 24, 2020 at 10:12 AM Jacob Head <gopher@jacob-head.com> wrote:

On 22/02/2020 19:29, Glenn Holmer wrote:
> https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/02/gopher-when-adversarial-interoperability-burrowed-under-gatekeepers-fortresses
>

“With [Web] browsers came URLs, identifiers that could be used to
retrieve any document on any Web server in the world. The Gopher team
quickly integrated URLs into Gopherspace, adding more flexibility and
ease to their service.”

I hadn’t really thought about this aspect of early gopher history before
reading the article. Does this mean for early users the experience was
that you’d have to start at a home page and browse your way down (I
guess like a BB) with no way of saving where you’d got to?

Jacob