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Re: [Link Posting] History of Gopher

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On Mon, 27 Aug 2018, Eli the Bearded wrote:

> In comp.misc, Rich  <rich@example.invalid> wrote:
>> <URL:https://prgmr.com/blog/gopher/2018/08/23/gopher.html>
>> The text below is a quotation from the URL above:
>>>  Soon after, the search capability came in the form of a new search
>>>  engine called Veronica. It was a whimsical time on the net, and geeks
>>>  still ruled most of it, so not only was the name taken from Archie
>>>  comics, it was soon turned into a backronym as "Very Easy
>>>  Rodent-Oriented Net-wide Index to Computer Archives". Veronica was
>>>  something of a brute-force approach. It used a dynamically updated
>>>  database of every file and every hierarchy on every Gopher server on the
>>>  internet.
>
> The missing bit there is "Veronica" was chosen as a reference to Archie
> comics because "Archie" was already in use as the name of a search
> engine for FTP sites. (How do you use a search engine for FTP sites?
> Email. You sent a query by email and you got a result sometime later in
> a response email.)
>
I always have to check, since I do associate the names with the comic 
book, but one of them isn't like the others.

Archie was a local creation, at McGill here.  One of the people involved 
was Peter Deutsch, not to be confused with the one (I think the name a bit 
different) in "Hackers".  About 1996 the local paper ran an article about 
him, he is credited with bringing the internet to Montreal said the 
article, though I'm not sure if that was just McGill (where he was) or 
overall.  But McGill long had a classified ad section on their webpage, 
and "forever" it was a gopher server.  Maybe about 2000, maybe it was 
later, they finally dropped it, and oddly it became less useful as an html 
page.  Though that's likely just that it let non-McGill people post.

About 1999 Peter Deutsch made an appearance in the local newsgroup, 
someone was coming from out of town and needed the cross street for an 
address, and Peter answered with the correct answer well down the thread. 
It was the only time I saw a post from him, so maybe someone had pointed 
the thread to him.

   Michael

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[Link Posting] History of Gopher Rich <rich@example.invalid> - 2018-08-27 12:05 +0000
  Re: [Link Posting] History of Gopher not@telling.you.invalid (Computer Nerd Kev) - 2018-08-27 22:38 +0000
    Re: [Link Posting] History of Gopher Ivan Shmakov <ivan@siamics.net> - 2018-09-17 12:37 +0000
  Re: [Link Posting] History of Gopher Eli the Bearded <*@eli.users.panix.com> - 2018-08-27 22:54 +0000
    Re: [Link Posting] History of Gopher Michael Black <mblack@pubnix.net> - 2018-08-27 22:54 -0400
  [Link Posting] History of Gopher Sehnsucht <paolovincenzo94@gmail.com> - 2018-08-31 18:25 -0700
  Web vs. Gopher Ivan Shmakov <ivan@siamics.net> - 2018-09-01 10:30 +0000
    Re:Web vs. Gopher sehnsucht <sehnsucht@fastmail.com> - 2018-09-01 13:34 +0200

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