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      DATE: 2019-11-02 (SAT)
     TITLE: GOPHERING
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The last time I used Gopher was in the 1990s on a Macintosh using a
56K modem (and later ISDN). I never had my own "gopherspace" but I
do remember perusing all sorts of Gopher servers. I don't recall
what particular client I used (it was definitely some sort of GUI
application), but to frame things into perspective, this was back
around the time when the dominant web browser was Netscape
Navigator. 

The internet felt so much more fun back then. It was like exploring
a digital Wild West. Over the ensuing years, I didn't really think
about Gopher much. I just assumed it was dead. I stumbled back into
this world by way of a blog post titled "I Miss the Old Internet"
[0]. The author doesn't specifically mention Gopher, but he writes
about a website called "MayVaneDay" [1] which has a very classic,
1990s, retro-WWW feel to it:

    "I miss the internet of the early 1990's, back before
    the World Wide Web had been visited by more than just a
    few computer geeks, back when websites like Vane's were
    the internet. Don't get me wrong, many cool things can
    be found on the internet today. But, the voice of
    individuals has mostly been drowned out, except on
    commercialized websites like Facebook and Reddit, where
    the contents of their communications can be easily
    monitored and controlled."

This really mirrors my own sentiments exactly. So, of course, I went
on to explore Vane's homepage. As I perused the "rollcall" page I
saw a section on "Gopherholes" [2]. I paused for a moment as I
thought, "wait a minute, what? Gopher is still a thing?"

Indeed. There's an entire little world of this stuff just sitting
there on the internet. And it's been here this whole time while. I
started by exploring tomasino's gopher.black [3] and from there I
stumbled onto SDF.

So, here I am.

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[0]: http://misc-stuff.terraaeon.com/articles/miss-old-internet.html
[1]: https://mayvaneday.art/
[2]: https://mayvaneday.art/rollcall.html
[3]: gopher://gopher.black