Re: Where Have all the Gophers Gone? Why the Web beat Gopher in the Battle for Protocol Mind Share

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From	Ben Bacarisse <ben.usenet@bsb.me.uk>
Newsgroups	comp.misc
Subject	Re: Where Have all the Gophers Gone? Why the Web beat Gopher in the Battle for Protocol Mind Share
Date	Thu, 28 Jan 2016 20:41:59 +0000
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RS Wood <rswood@therandymon.com> writes:

> Richard Kettlewell <rjk@greenend.org.uk> Wrote in message:
>> I didn’t ask “how do I get at it”, I asked why I would bother in the
>> first place.
>
>
> And you got your answer: go have a look around.  It's all
>  personal, zero corporate, so it's got lots of whatever individual
>  users care to post and provide.  Or check out gopherpedia, a
>  gopher interface to wikipedia. I like it better than wikipedia
>  itself.  Start at floodgap and "go down the hole."

Because it's not hyper-linked, you can't "go down the hole" like you can
from a web page.  As a result, randomly exploring is very hard.  The
floodgap menu just offers a set of (to me) uninteresting menu choices
which seem extraordinarily parochial.

Gopher always worked best with a search, but you can't usually "go down
the hole" with a search -- you either find the document you want or you
don't.

None of my trial searches showed any pages from gopherpedia so it looks
like it's a hard boundary -- there's a gopher interface but none of
wikipedia has been brought into gopherspace.

I don't currently see a use-case for me but, because I like the old
technology, I'll try every once in a while to see if anything I'm
looking for turns up there...

-- 
Ben.

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