# All of Gopherspace as a single download



## Mumbodog (Oct 3, 2007)

Does anyone remember Gopher

http://changelog.complete.org/archives/1466-download-a-piece-of-internet-history



> Back in the early 1990s, before there was a World Wide Web, there was the Internet Gopher. It was a distributed information system in the same sense as the web, but didnt use hypertext and was text-based. Gopher was popular back then, as it made it easy to hop from one server to the next in a way that FTP didnt.
> 
> Gopher has hung on over the years, and is still clinging to life in a way. Back in 2007, I was disturbed at the number of old famous Gopher servers that had disappeared off the Internet without a trace. Some of these used to be known by most users of the Internet in the early 90s. To my knowledge, no archive of this data existed. Nobody like archive.org had ever attempted to save Gopherspace.
> 
> So I decided I would. I wrote Gopherbot, a spidering archiver for Gopherspace. I ran it in June 2007, and saved off all the documents and sites it could find. That saved 40GB of data, or about 780,000 documents. Since that time, more servers have died. To my knowledge, this is the only comprehensive archive there is of what Gopherspace was like.


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## TechGuy (Feb 12, 1999)

I never used Gopher, but certainly know a good bit about it. It was just coming out of favor as I got into the web in the mid-90s. It's great that someone had the foresight to archive all of that information. It's even nicer that he's openly sharing it to anyone who wants to download it.


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## Mumbodog (Oct 3, 2007)

I have it downloaded, seeding now, I have not looked at the files yet, should be interesting, 40gb, might last me a few years of looking.

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## Mumbodog (Oct 3, 2007)

There is a really good video with that download, an interview with the 2 guys that developed Gopher.

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## lotuseclat79 (Sep 12, 2003)

Hey Mumbodog,

Did you try to use gopher w/Firefox yet? It is a supported protocol. See gopher at Wikipedia Gopher_(protocol).

-- Tom


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## Mumbodog (Oct 3, 2007)

lotuseclat79 said:


> Hey Mumbodog,
> 
> Did you try to use gopher w/Firefox yet? It is a supported protocol. See gopher at Wikipedia Gopher_(protocol).
> 
> -- Tom


Many of the files will not extract on a windows file system, because the file names have disallowed characters, would need to unpack it on Linux or a Mac, which I don't have at the moment. : -(

Thanks for the info.

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## lotuseclat79 (Sep 12, 2003)

Get a Linux Live CD - that should work.

-- Tom


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## Mumbodog (Oct 3, 2007)

lotuseclat79 said:


> Get a Linux Live CD - that should work.
> 
> -- Tom


And where do I unpack the files to? The NTFS partition? Then when I boot into windows it will have a bunch of files with disallowed characters, wonder what would happen then.

Pass

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## lotuseclat79 (Sep 12, 2003)

Hi Mumbodog,

I didn't mean save another 40GB, just use the gopher protocol - gopher://... locations address to download a single small file to see it work - i.e. within the constraints of your RAM when using the Live CD - so, no need to save the file unless you want to mount a file system with the mount command to save (cp) it from RAM to hard drive.

-- Tom


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## Mumbodog (Oct 3, 2007)

lotuseclat79 said:


> Hi Mumbodog,
> 
> I didn't mean save another 40GB, just use the gopher protocol - gopher://... locations address to download a single small file to see it work - i.e. within the constraints of your RAM when using the Live CD - so, no need to save the file unless you want to mount a file system with the mount command to save (cp) it from RAM to hard drive.
> 
> -- Tom


I think it is getting a little beyond my Linux/Gopher skills which = not much. I will have to enlist the help of my son, thanks for trying.

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