Gopher
Beg, Burrow, and Steal
Gopher, a search and retrieval system, will help you discover a myriad
of interesting information without having to deal with difficult Internet
technospeak. Follow this step by step through a sample Gopher search.
What is Gopher, you may ask, and why is it
named after a bucktoothed animal? Technically speaking, Gopher is a distributed
document search and retrieval system or, in simpler language, an easy way
to gain access to a huge amount of information on the Internet. It uses
a nested, menu-based interface, which allows you to drill down through different
lists until you reach your intended or actual destination. Using Gopher,
you can link up to many different computers without having to know lengthy,
incomprehensible commands. In fact, you rarely have to type anything more
than a menu number. You can use Telnet and FTP from Gopher, and fairly easily
download anything you find in your Gopher journeys onto your own hard drive.
Virtually anyone with an Internet account can use Gopher. Regardless of
whether you use a PC, a Mac, a UNIX workstation, or almost any other system,
Gopher is there at your fingertips, ready to scamper off and retrieve some
information for you.
Function Over Style
During the last few years, a multitude of tools for finding information
on the Internet have appeared, but Gopher has withstood the competition.
In fact, Gopher's popularity continues to increase, and its widespread use,
mainly in university settings, shows no signs of abating.
Gopher's appeal stems from its ease of use, relative speed, and intuitive
organization. Another attractive feature: You don't need special software
on your PC to run it. If you happen to be sitting in front of a networked
UNIX terminal (or you dial into a UNIX shell account), you can type Gopher
at your prompt. You will likely be cast into your organization's hierarchy
of information, which allows you to surf just as easily as if you were scanning
an extremely large table of contents. If the Gopher command doesn't work,
ask your systems administrator to install it. It's free, after all.
If you use the World Wide Web through Netscape, Mosaic, or any other popular
browser, you can access Gopher sites from there as well. To get ahold of
the University of Southern California Gopher site, for example, select Open
URL from the File menu and type Gopher://cwis.usc.edu.
The screens don't look as pretty as well- designed Web pages, but they're
still highly functional. Actually, function over style is one of the reasons
many people prefer Gopher to the Web, especially if they're trying to get
work done.
Digging on the Wild Side
Gopher's main feature is its ability to take you effortlessly from one Gopher
listing to another, anywhere in the world. For this sample walkthrough (which
I did using a simple UNIX shell account), I wanted to visit a fun, interesting
site, but first I had to find one. I started with my own university's main
Gopher, and simply progressed through many menus. From the first menu listing,
I selected 9) Electronic Resources Around The World/. When the resulting
menu appeared, I selected 4) Campus and Other Information Systems/. From
the next menu, I picked 17) Subject Specific Information Servers/, then
chose 29) PEG - A Peripatetic, Eclectic Gopher/.
Whew! It sounds like a lot of traveling just to get to a site with the word
peripatetic in it, but it was no big deal. All those menu selections were
performed within one minute. Now -- how did I do this? Any menu selection
with a slash (/) after its description will
take you to another menu listing. If you choose a selection that has no
slash, you will receive a file (or something else that's not a menu). All
menu items are numbered, so to choose a specific item, you either type that
item's number (it will appear at the bottom of your screen), or use your
up and down arrow keys to scroll through the menu selections. Hit return
when you're ready to move on. If there's more than one page of listings,
hit the space bar.
I thought PEG seemed like a good choice for a walkthrough with Gopher, since
its purpose is, according to its maintainer, "to demonstrate the utility
and the versatility of a Gopher server in providing improved access to needed
information distributed throughout the network."
Some of the subject headings from the PEG main menu were: Politics and Government,
Humanities, The Virtual Reference Desk, Women's Studies and Resources, Electronic
Journals, and Favorite Bookmarks. There was, it seemed, something for everyone,
as tends to be the case with Gophers.
I checked out the Virtual Reference Desk first and found that it was an
electronic encyclopedia housing frequently accessed information stored on
various computers across the U.S. The Virtual Reference Desk also contained
a list of up-to-date currency exchanges, as well as an item called Food
and Drink, which stored a collection of varied recipes, from lobster and
Thai Masaman to a drink called Jamaica-Me-Crazy. And this is just one submenu
of one sub-Gopher of one Gopher on the whole Internet! After exploring the
Virtual Reference Desk, I returned to the PEG main menu (done by pressing
return to go back one screen or by pressing U to go up one menu).
This time, I checked out item 3) Electronic Journals. There I found a list
of published journals (by no means exhaustive) available in electronic format,
including titles such as The New Republic and some postmodern culture publications.
The PEG Gopher also contained an extensive listing of French Language sites
under its Humanities category, as well as a frequently updated list of other
interesting sites maintained by PEG's creator.
Most Gophers are more subject-specific than this one. Many universities
throughout the world have Gophers, known as campuswide information systems,
to help people navigate their way through the university. They offer information
about campus services, academic policies, campus and community events, athletics,
and the like.
So Gopher away! You'll discover information without encountering difficult
Internet lingo. To get started, try the following pretty cool sites, which
will take you to many other Gophers -- PEG: peg.cwis.uci.edu
(select 13, then 9); Gopher Jewels: cwis.usc.edu
(select 9, then 11); and Electronic Frontier Foundation: gopher.eff.org.
-- Carrie Pascal
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