Welcome to the official gopher for the nascent ESS, a society
dedicated to preserving our civilization's software heritage. There
are already a number of organizations with similar aims -- several
linked below -- but one thing which differentiates the ESS from some
others is that the ESS strives to preserve the usefulness of old
software in addition to the code itself.

Employing Gopher to expose our resources to the Internet is a perfect
distillation of our mission and our values. The gopher protocol is one
of the earliest hypertext protocols. Despite being almost entirely
supplanted by the World Wide Web, it remains useful even today. It is
an interesting alternative to HTTP and even has some advantages over
its more successful sibling.

This site is very much a work in progress, so please revisit every so
often to see what we've been up to. Also, at this early stage, the
Society is primarily an extension of the founder's interests, there
being only one member. At times I may be a little loose in my usage of
personal pronouns, but I will try to stick with first person plural
when speaking for the Society as I envision it.