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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