Re: good gopher article by Cory Doctorow

On 2/24/20 1:06 PM, Jacob Head wrote:
> On 22/02/2020 19:29, Glenn Holmer wrote:
>> https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/02/gopher-when-adversarial-interoperability-burrowed-under-gatekeepers-fortresses
>>
> 
> “With [Web] browsers came URLs, identifiers that could be used to
> retrieve any document on any Web server in the world. The Gopher team
> quickly integrated URLs into Gopherspace, adding more flexibility and
> ease to their service.”
> 
> I hadn’t really thought about this aspect of early gopher history before
> reading the article. Does this mean for early users the experience was
> that you’d have to start at a home page and browse your way down (I
> guess like a BB) with no way of saving where you’d got to?



I'm hoping someone on this list has an answer.  I've wondered about this 
as well and a low-effort search just now didn't satisfy my curiosity.

I use Lynx (and sometimes cURL) for my Gopher activities and of course 
these both understand "gopher://" protocol prefixes and URLs.

Most phloggers seem to choose URL-style syntax to specify Gopher links, 
rather than mimicking the old-school tab-based "native" Gopher menu syntax.

I imagine the pre-Web-era clients would have at least let you supply the 
host (and maybe port). But would they also have let you specify a 
selector? And if so, would you then need to supply the correct type (0 
for file, 1 for menu...) as well?

I imagine many of the early systems would have been set up to 
automatically connect to the institution's own starting menu just like 
you describe.  But that's mere conjecture on my part.

-Dave Gauer