Re: good gopher article by Cory Doctorow

Hi John,

Yes, screen scraping was a thing. I have some old expect scripts to download the weather, and way, way before

there were headless browsers we had a scripted tn3270 emulator that let us grab screens in a programmatic way.

Cool to hear about your experiments with physical terminals and LoRa. I'm a supporter of Diaster Radio

which uses LoRa radios and Arduino boards to create a mesh network. Check it out.

The closest I came to old school terminals is Cool Retro Term

I recompiled elm and took some screenshots for my wife's memorial site

using old mbox files. Elm influenced the curses client as you can

clearly see.

On Mon, Feb 24, 2020 at 3:33 PM John Goerzen <jgoerzen@complete.org> wrote:

Really appreciate you doing that, Paul. I learned quite a bit; I hadn't
realized that screen-scraping was such a thing in Gopherspace back then.

I recently purchased a DEC vt420 and a DEC vt510 off eBay. Once I got
it hooked up to a Raspberry Pi and working (turns out there is a lot of
bugginess in modern support for XON/XOFF terminals), of course the first
thing I did was fire up gopher and run it in its natural habitat. I had
never owned an actual serial terminal before, and only rarely used one
in a library back in the day.

https://changelog.complete.org/archives/10031-resurrecting-ancient-operating-systems-on-debian-raspberry-pi-and-docker

I, uh, may have also tunneled Gopher over long-range low-power LoRa
radios recently....

https://changelog.complete.org/archives/10042-long-range-radios-a-perfect-match-for-unix-protocols-from-the-70s

I tunneled TCP/IP over it. Ping times around 500ms, throughput around
30Kbps. It's as if it's 1995 again around here. (I did do some
optimization and running TCP/IP over PPP instead of AX.25 made some
improvements there later.)

It seems the first thing I want to test on a new link is Gopher.

John

On Sat, Feb 22 2020, Paul Lindner wrote:

> A+++ would advise again :)
>
> ... and thanks to all the folks keeping Gopher going.
>
>
> On Sat, Feb 22, 2020 at 11:30 AM Glenn Holmer <cenbe@kolabnow.com> wrote:
>
>>
>> https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/02/gopher-when-adversarial-interoperability-burrowed-under-gatekeepers-fortresses
>>
>> --
>> Glenn Holmer (Linux registered user #16682)
>> "After the vintage season came the aftermath -- and Cenbe."
>>