Welcome to the IAGU
(International Association of Gopher Users)
The Word Wide Web is a mess. For too long, Tim Bernerd Lee impose his dictatorship all over the world. All over the world ? No ! Some freedom fighters are still defending the gopher citadell ! This site is here to explain you you what is gopher, how to use it and why to use it. Gopher is a protocol system, which in advance of the World Wide Web, allowed server based text files to be hierarchically organised and easily viewed by end users who accessed the server using Gopher applications on remote computers. Initially Gopher browsers could only display text-based files before developments such as HyperGopher, which were able to handle simple graphic formats though they were never used on a widespread basis as by this time the World Wide Web and its Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) were gaining in popularity, and had similar and more extensive functions. The Gopher protocol and original Gopher viewer application were first developed at the University of Minnesota in the early 1990’s as part of the drive to make use of the Internet to enable the simple sharing of documents with people who could be located in institutions on opposite sides of the country or even the world, and to have those documents organised so that similar / related pages would be easily accessible. The value of the Gopher system was enhanced by the development of two systems known as Veronica and Jughead which allowed a user to search across resources stored in Gopher file hierarchies on a global basis. As for the naming of the system, the University of Minnesota sports teams were called the ‘Golden Gophers’ and the sports mascot was thus a large gopher, it has been said that the protocol was named in honour of the mascot, and also as in an assistant who's sent to ‘go for’ things.
News
04/05/2016
- Initial release. We're now on the web. !
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