Re: good gopher article by Cory Doctorow

Hi Jacob!

Back then you'd have a text file with all the FTP sites, telnet sites, Muds
or even BBSs)
Often you'd download them off a USENET newsgroup.  Then you'd use a command
line..
Not easy for a casual user.

So yes, you'd get a default server often set by the organization that
brought you online.

You could enter a hostname/port combination, not quite as elegant as a
URL.  (See
https://happymacs.wordpress.com/tag/turbogopher/ for an example of setting
the default and navigating to a new server)

All early Gopher clients had bookmarks so you could easily keep track.  In
fact some gopher
clients would default to your bookmarks on startup.

On Mon, Feb 24, 2020 at 10:12 AM Jacob Head <gopher-yT/[email protected]> 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?
>
> Jacob
>
>