Gopher n. 1. Any of various short tailed, burrowing
mammals of the family Geomyidae, of North America. 2.
(Amer. colloq.) Native or inhabitant of Minnesota: the
Gopher State. 3. (Amer. colloq.) One who runs errands,
does odd-jobs, fetches or delivers documents for office
staff. 4. (Computer tech.) software following a simple
protocol for tunneling through a TCP/IP internet.
TurboGopher n. 1. A small rodent with a turbocharger
strapped on its back to increase the its speed and
ferocity. 2. (Amer. colloq.) Native or inhabitant of
Minnesota after consuming three double espressos.
3. (Amer. colloq.) An Olympic sprinter who runs errands,
does odd-jobs, fetches or delivers documents for office
staff. 4. (computer tech.) Speed-optimized Macintosh
software following a simple protocol for tunneling through
a TCP/IP internet; network speed is achieved by using
turbocharged software; incoming bits spin the turbine that
pumps out the outgoing bits.
Overview
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TurboGopher is a Macintosh application that we believe is the fastest Mac Gopher client currently available. Beyond optimizing TurboGopher for raw speed while fetching documents and directories, we turbocharged the user interface by displaying information as soon as possible... you can read the first part of a document or directory while the rest is being fetched
In spite of the design goal to run fast as possible, TurboGopher is a good Mac citizen: it shares time with other applications. You can put TurboGopher in the background to fetch lengthy items in the background while you work in another application in the foreground.
Information accessible via Gopher is stored on many computers all over the Internet. These computers are called Gopher servers (although a lot of information that is not directly on Gopher servers is indirectly accessible via special Gopher servers). Virtually any popular computer (Mac, Unix box, PC, or larger computer) can be used as a server. Servers do not just contain files, directories and searchable databases; they can also contain references to other servers. To retrieve and search this information, you need to run a Gopher client application on your computer. TurboGopher is a Gopher client application. You can set it up to remember how to connect to one server; from here you can effortlessly traverse the web of all interlinked servers.
Getting Help with TurboGopher
-----------------------------
In addition to this information you are reading right now, if you are using System 7 (and we strongly recommend that you do), some Balloon Help is available in TurboGopher. See your Macintosh System 7 documentation for information on using Balloon Help.
Using TurboGopher
-----------------
TurboGopher uses the MacTCP software to communicate with gopher servers on a network. Assuming your Mac has correctly configured MacTCP software installed in the System Folder, TurboGopher is all set to go. Launching TurboGopher will connect you to one of the default Gopher servers from which you can explore the rest of networked gopherspace.
Navigating Gopherspace
----------------------
To navigate through gopherspace, double-click on any interesting items to open (fetch) them. If you double-click on a file, TurboGopher will fetch and display the file. Opening a folder will let you view its contents. Double-clicking on the question-mark (Search) icons will let you search a database. On most gopher servers these databases are full-text indexes of a collection of information. Full-text index means that every word in every document is considered a keyword. So the best way to search a gopher database is specify words for which to search when TurboGopher presents you with a dialog box. The results of the search are returned as a list of documents containing those words.
If you Double-click on the phone-book icons you can search electronic phone books. Phone book databases are structured in the sense that they have fields (i.e. a name field, an address field, and a phone number field). You have the opportunity to specify which fields to search in, when you formulate a query. The result of the query is displayed in a document.
Disk icons represent archived Mac software or documents that you can fetch; these items will be saved to your hard disk.
Opening the "terminal" icons will make TurboGopher launch NCSA Telnet (or TN3270 if appropriate) and start a terminal session to a terminal-based information system. Typically these are library catalogs or other such services. Note that for this to work, you need to have Telnet or TN3270 installed on your Macintosh. If you are still running System 6, TurboGopher will only save a Telnet session file rather than launch Telnet; another good reason to run System 7 on your Mac.
Advanced Navigation Features
----------------------------
If you double-click on a folder while holding down the Option key, TurboGopher will close the current window as it opens a new one on top of it. Some folks like to do this to prevent screen clutter and keep from having too many open windows.
You may use the up and down arrow keys on your keyboard to move up and down lists in windows. The Enter or Return key opens an item (and is equivalent to double-clicking on an item).
TurboGopher remembers the last full-text index search (item with question-mark icon) you used. If now you hold down the Option key and double-click on a word in a document window, TurboGopher will query that search service for all documents containing the word you selected. You must use a search service before this hypertext capability is accessible (TurboGopher needs to know which search service to use in your hypertext query).
Save or print documents using the Save or Print menu items under the File menu. The Recent menu lets you go back instantly to any directory window you have viewed during your Gopher session. The left and right arrow keys may be used to go to previous or next windows; they are equivalent to traversing the recent menu upwards or downwards. Note that the Recent menu only remembers and lists directory windows you visit. Document or Phone-book lookup windows are not listed.
Bookmarks
-----------------
If you formulate a search or find a folder you would like to come back to quickly later, you can use the Set Bookmark menu item to save your place. Set Bookmark saves a reference to folder, file, search, terminal session... in fact any Gopher item. Choosing Set Bookmark with any item selected (hilighted) lets you make a bookmark for that item. If nothing is selected in the front list window, a bookmark is made for a folder representing the window. Try it, it's easier to do than to say.
Bookmarks are placed in a special Bookmarks window. Use the Show Bookmarks menu item to open the Bookmarks window. Bookmarks are remembered even after you quit TurboGopher; contents of the Recent menu are however forgotten.
To delete a bookmark, click once on a bookmark item (in the Bookmarks window) to select it. Then choose the Delete Bookmarks menu item.
The Import and Export Bookmarks menu items let you bring in or write out files containing your bookmark information. You may exchange these Gopher Bookmark files with other Gopher users if you wish. Double-clicking a Gopher Bookmark file will launch TurboGopher as you might expect, however TurboGopher will not connect to the default Home Gopher server immediately in this case.
It might be useful to consider the Bookmarks window to be a special kind of “worksheet” or “construction area” for you to construct your own personal list of useful gopher resources. You may double-click (open) Gopher Bookmark files from the Finder. If you launch TurboGopher by double-clicking on a Bookmark file, it will not immediately connect to the Home Gopher server, but will open the Bookmark file instead. So you may use Bookmark files as custom Home Gopher servers.
Canceling Slow Network Operations
---------------------------------
TurboGopher executes most requests in a few seconds. A document or directory is displayed as it is received. However if a server is especially slow or busy or if you have started to fetch what appears to be a very long and uninteresting document or directory, you may cancel the fetching process by choosing the Cancel All Requests menu item (or by holding down the command key and typing a period). This is especially useful if you are using a slow speed SLIP link and you've seen the top lines of a long directory or file and decided that you are not interested in having TurboGopher finish fetching the item. If you open a file or folder by double-clicking while holding down the Option key (to conserve screen space as described earlier), TurboGopher will also cancel the running network transaction if one is outstanding; and this is in fact exactly what you want under SLIP. Both these features make TurboGopher seem faster and more responsive over SLIP links.
TurboGopher runs happily in the background (if you wish to fetch something very large or from a very slow server). You may also fetch an item (file or directory) while another one is still being fetched, since TurboGopher supports multiple concurrent streams. Command-Period will cancel all active streams.
Starting, Configuring, Gopher Options
-------------------------------------
The Start Gopher menu item opens a window containing the initial directory fetched by connecting to your "primary" or "home" Gopher server. TurboGopher is pre-configured to connect on startup to one of the University of Minnesota's Gopher servers. You may change your "home" or primary Gopher server by using the "Configure" menu item under the Setup menu. To do this you need the full Internet domain name and port of the desired primary server. It is now possible to configure TurboGopher to use one of two alternate primary servers. This distributes the load for a campus over two different (but equivalent) primary servers and it prevents a single point of failure. TurboGopher will randomly try one of the two and then try the other if the first is down. If you don't understand this, you don't have to bother with it or with the Another Gopher menu item.
Use the Another Gopher menu item to connect directly to a Gopher server if you know its full domain name and port. If you wish to find out more about Gopher in's-and-out's visit the University of Minnesota's Gopher server and look in the Information About Gopher folder.
The Open Gopher Bookmarks File menu item opens a Bookmark file. This is equivalent to double clicking a Bookmark file in the Finder. It is however different from the Import Bookmarks menu item; the former places the contents of the Bookmarks file in their own window, the latter places them in the Bookmarks window.
Use the Options menu item (Setup menu) to customize some behaviors of TurboGopher. The Single Directory Window checkbox makes TurboGopher recycle its windows whenever you open a new directory (and not just when you hold down the Option key).
Checking the "Cache Everything in Recent Menu" box will retain all visited directory lists (even when windows are closed). Since these lists don't ever have to be fetched from the server again, this dramatically increases speed when choosing any item from the Recent menu. We strongly recommend that you leave this item checked. To be sure this uses more memory. However if TurboGopher runs out of memory it will first inform you and then automatically release the caches. This means there is really no penalty and very great benefits to using the Caching option.
When you save documents, TurboGopher normally saves them as MacWrite II TEXT documents (we like MacWrite II). If you’d rather save them as TEXT documents of your favorite word processor or editor, use the appropriate button in the Options dialog to select the word processor of your choice. If you choose Word, we don’t really want to know!
Use the ISO Latin-1 button if you need to use Latin/Romance language characters. Many sites in Europe have a need for this to display their national characters. If you visit European gopher servers and the accented characters don't display correctly, you may want to choose this option. If you visit Gopher servers with Japanese documents, and you are running a Japanese system under System 7.1 or better, click on the Japanese SIS (MS Kanji) button to enable the display of Japanese (Kanji) characters. Similarly you may enable the display of Classical Chinese characters if you are running a Chinese system.
Miscellaneous.
-------------
The Get Attribute Info and Get Alternate Forms menu items are part of the Gopher+ protocol extensions. At the time of this release of TurboGopher, there are no real Gopher+ server implementations and these items need to be tested further both for user interface and bugs. Consequently they are disabled in this release. You'll also notice a disabled Gopher+ checkbox in the Configuration dialog. All these features will be alive in the next major release...
TurboGopher stores what it needs in a file called TurboGopher Settings; this lives in the Preferences folder, which is found in your System Folder.
For Experts
-----------
For folks wondering about Gopher+ protocol features, they've been excluded from this release. We'll turn them all on in the next major release after we've done some more local testing with them. We will also do an overall tuning for yet more speed.
If you are a campus or department network administrator, and you would like information about pre-configuring internal defaults, please send e-mail to the Gopher Team at:
gopher@boombox.micro.umn.edu
Please write to the development team (at the above address) with bugs, suggestions, or (of course!) praise. To be informed by e-mail of new developments in the Gopher world, or of new versions of Gopher software, you may subscribe to "gopher-news"; Send your request to:
gopher-news-request@boombox.micro.umn.edu.
Have fun surfing the Internet...
- The Internet Gopher Team at the University of Minnesota
