gopher:// -- (Plus an arpa question)

Are they all gone by now?

[geekay]

Do you know of any genuine gopher:// site still active?

I have not seen one since the mid 1990's and it would be fun to revive nostalgic memories. But maybe modern browsers simply can't handle this protocol. I read that in 1994 there were still 5 000 Gopher sites. At least the ancient main site, gopher://gopher.tc.umn.edu/, seems to be gone.

Could I set up a gopher site? Perhaps no server can host that.

My site regularly gets hits from arpa (that's the full domain, and TLD, in the log). I know Arpanet, but who are actually using the arpa domain today?

[encyclo]

You can still run a gopher server easily on any Linux server, although you might have to compile it yourself.

The only gopher site I know of which is still running is:

gopher://quux.org/

Most browsers can still do Gopher too, including IE, Firefox, Mozilla...

[Syzygy]

In addition to gTLDs and ccTLDs, there is one special TLD, .arpa, which is used for technical infrastructure purposes. ICANN administers the .arpa TLD in cooperation with the Internet technical community under the guidance of the Internet Architecture Board.

From ICANN [icann.org]

Syzygy

I only know that because I read it on the ICANN site just recently...

[geekay]

Thank you both! I spent an intersting time in internet history with my old Netscape having moved myself more than ten years back in time. For those who would like to try the same experience I should quote the following from the gopher site:

"Because of security bulletin MS02-047, Gopher support is NOW DISABLED IN INTERNET EXPLORER 6 and higher." There is a solution offered at:
gopher://gopher.floodgap.com/0/gopher/wbgopher
but this page can't (!) be viewed with IE. FF does work.

However, many other pages can be accessed with IE by http via:
[gopher.quux.org:70...]
to get some idea of what gopher looks like.

[pmkpmk]

Usually, arpa-adresses in your logfiles almost always originate from wrongly configured nameservers. As far as I know there are only very few actively used machines with actual arpa-addressed.

Gopher almost made me "miss the train" with http and browsers. I'm on the net since '89, and I really liked Gopher when it was new. It was easy. Fast. Reliable. I still remember when somebody showed me Mosaic and the Cern-webpage. I simply did not get the point. I did not see where this should be superior to Gopher. So I dismissed it. All my colleagues were deep into HTML and websites, when I woke up a year later.

Well, Bill Gates took even longer to realize the potential, so I'm still better off :-)

[Teknorat]

gopher://erwin.complete.org/1/Software/Gopher/servers

Hmm a nice little list of other gopher sites out there.