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Comment by mech422 | Hacker News Reader

I miss the feeling of 'exploring' I got everytime I found a new .edu gopher server... Tracking down all the nooks and crannies looking for documents related to tech. How awesome it felt went you found some lecture notes/thesis that was just _gold_ and you could curl up and read it ...

Stonybrook algorithm repository was a similiar feeling...just going thru and exploring all the different techniques people have come up with.

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Fun fact: gopher is still alive! It's not the same as back in the early 90s, but the protocol and some servers are alive and kicking.

Yeah? I haven't looked in years... Though I think I've probably lost some of the feeling of wonder exploring those servers 20 years ago engendered. For a young coder, from a small town with basically zero tech resources - they seemed like the library of Alexandria :-)

It's still there! I'd recommend gopher://gopher.floodgap.com/ as a starting page these days, it has links to SDF, Veronica 2, and a lot of other Gopher resources. It's pretty easy to spin up your own Gopher hole with pygopherd these days as well - I re-hosted mine a few weeks ago and could't have been happier with the ease of setting it up.

There are are lot of defunct Gopher holes, but a couple times a year I still get lost browsing through a mix of old and new ones. Install OverbiteWX in Firefox and take it for a spin sometime!

oh? I'll have to take another look - there was SOOO much good technical content!

I also just discovered that there's an HN gopher hole!

hngopher.com/1/

I loaded up the open source app Pocket Gopher (available on F-Droid), and while the formatting of ASCII graphics doesn't translate well to portrait mode, everything works.

Ohh..Something like that could be nice on my tablet. Thanks!

I have a feeling Gopher nowadays has more 'holes' available than it ever had :-P

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