I'm worried that the death of these easily accessible sources will push more and more pupils into relying on Wikipedia or even worse: AI. Being critical of what you see online and finding facts yourself is crucial to digital literacy.
The client was not graphical. I felt like it was like swinging from vine to vine with each vine being a gopher site. Once one was on a site one could drill down a directory structure of published data. One would access an initial site by typing in it's IP address or domain name. One could then follow the gopher links until exhaustion or all the links on that site were visited.
There was a period of time before the WWW was graphical and I found gopher far superior for browsing. One had to download files and then view them locally using local tools.
One could even follow a gopher link to the WWW. The splash page had the slogan "Welcome to the World Wide Web there is no top or bottom". This could not be said of Gopher sites where each site had to be connected to directly and all the links on the site could be visited.
Once IP addressees became available to the public WWW browser became graphical. This made the Gopher less useful since it was stuck as terminal browser. The IP address made the machine one was browsing from addressable to every host on the internet. This made inline graphics more practical because they could be rendered in line while browsing.
Gemini is a newer protocol influenced by Gopher.[1]
https://github.com/xvxx/phetch
It's written in Golang and was last updated in 2022. There's a GIF on the Github page to give a feel of what Phetch & browsing Gopher in the terminal is like. I mostly use the Lagrange GUI client though, which is fantastic.
Gopher still exists. If you're starting out, you can get your own "gopherhole" and Unix shell account at https://sdf.org/ It's a long time since I updated mine, but I'm at gopher://sdf.org:70/1/users/syneryder/
gopher:// or ftp://
PS. Lagrange is a beautiful piece of software.
Gopher is sort of like Latin, it's a dead protocol, but is still useful.
0. https://lynx.invisible-island.net/lynx_help/lynx_url_support...
What does that even mean?
This was just a terminal connection where one could connect to other hosts on the internet through a dial-up connection. The modem would connect to a computer that had a route to an internet gateway. PANIX provided a Unix user account one could dial into. One didn't need an IP address to get on the internet. The difference was that an internet host couldn't find/connect to the terminal one was browsing on. There was no "addressability". If one downloaded a file from the internet it didn't end up on the machine one was using. The file ended up in a directory on the computer one was dialed into. The second step of retrieving the file involved downloading the file from your home directory on the Unix machine one was dialed into. In my case I think I needed a modem that supported the Zmodem protocol.
Eventual the dial-up providers were able to provide IP addresses using the SLIP (serial link IP). Once one had an IP the machine was on equal footing of all the other internet hosts. The computers could exchange information directly. This provided an easy way for a web browser to directly connect from the machine one was using and the host one was connected to. This is when graphical browser became available to everyone with an IP address. The graphics became inline and could be rendered directly on the client.
I believe there were ways prior to this to inline render graphics I never experienced them. AOL used to be a closed network with graphics and no internet gateway. CompuServe may have been similar. I never used either of those systems.
Outside of my college's library connection I only accessed the internet through PANIX until the internet boom. I learned about PANIX through an ad in the back of Computer Shopper.
And before it, slip had been available and standardized for some time.
I would say what drove the adoption of commercial services was the graphical web, not the other way around.
I read about graphical browsers in MacWeek in an article about SoundWire. This was a website that was selling music on the web. I believe fulfillment was through snailmail. There headquarters were in a Brooklyn apartment. I somehow contacted the owner (Joe a friend of Dang) and took the subway to his apartment to see a graphical browser in action. I don't know how long it took to actually get my own IP address but I know it took me a few days to get a MacPPP connection to actually work over slip.
And I can see you struggle to get PPP to work over slip!
I used Gopher when I did a high school summer science camp at Indiana University in 1994. It was a really interesting time of transition when the graphical Web was just coming on-line with Mosaic, but most tools were still textual/command line (FTP, pine/elm email/Usenet clients, MUDs, etc.)
Here's a good image of your typical Gopher page: https://img.sysnettechsolutions.com/What-is-Gopher-Nedir-EN....
https://chatgpt.com/share/6984c899-6cc4-8013-a8f6-ec204ee631...
Even if a pupil does pay, they will either be too lazy to wait the nearly 10 minutes it takes for the AI to do its research, or they actually care about getting good grades and therefore won't outsource their research to AI.
There is nothing wrong with Wikipedia, at least in the main languages. It's crowdsourced and has citations (and where there aren't "citation needed" help identify that).
It gives you superficial, in depth and factual information, with links to sources for more details if needed.
Well, except for the very obvious political bias
https://manhattan.institute/article/new-study-finds-politica...
Is that a bias or just reality?
Right leaning politicians in the US include people paying underage girls for sex, people screaming about "Jewish Space lasers", people obviously stealing money in plain sight with crypto pumps and dumps, people running away from responsibility, people getting caught engaging in sexual acts in public, and on and on and on. Their left-wing equivalents are... extremely mild by comparison. What, some run of the mill corruption and sexual comments that resulted in resignations?
If go past "right wing is associated with more negative things", and look into what those negative things are, you'd realise it's just reality. Just because there are two parties and two categories of political leanings doesn't mean they are somehow equal.
But to put it with John Steward, what if reality itself has a left leaning bias?
What if left leaning people have empirically broader empathy [0] which could imply that right leaning people have in tendency worse personalities. I guess you would attest yet another biased article here.
"The Manhattan Institute for Policy Research is an American 501(c)(3) nonprofit[5] conservative think tank."
It is a report generated by this conservative organization (that presumably gets donations from many other conservatives). Is there a chance that the report itself is suspect?
If you look at the sentiment for public figures given, the bottom one is, for example, Brett Kavanaugh. Well, he was credibly accused of sexual assault during his confirmation hearings, which was a huge deal at the time. Someone with that on their record will probably be read as negative, but, I mean, not the editors’ fault!
Even notorious dictators like Mao Zedong get treated with kid gloves as long as they’re on the left: https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/how-wikipedia-whitewashe...
> His policies resulted in the deaths of tens of millions of people in China during his reign, mainly due to starvation, but also through persecution, prison labour in laogai, and mass executions
What's "kid gloves" about that?
Let's contrast with the the farthest thing from a leftwing dictator we can find, the quintessential rightwing one, Adolf Hitler. Here's the intro to his Wikipedia page:
> Adolf Hitler[a] (20 April 1889 – 30 April 1945) was an Austrian-born German politician who was the dictator of Germany during the Nazi era, which lasted from 1933 until his suicide in 1945. He rose to power as the leader of the Nazi Party,[b] becoming the chancellor of Germany in 1933 and then taking the title of Führer und Reichskanzler in 1934.[c] Germany's invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939 under his leadership marked the outbreak of the Second World War. Throughout the ensuing conflict, Hitler was closely involved in the direction of German military operations as well as the perpetration of the Holocaust, the genocide of about six million Jews and millions of other victims.
Note how the atrocities are last, same as Mao.
https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/how-wikipedia-whitewashe...
We are fucking cooked.
A source of propaganda? There's nothing the CIA does without political motivation.
For example, the IDF now accepts Hamas's death toll estimates after decrying them as inflated for years. https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2026-01-29/ty-article/.p...
Even then, political motivation in itself does not make it inaccurate. It’s easy to see why a liberal democracy supposed to defend liberty across the globe would be interested in making facts accessible. Facts and education are the best way to fight obscurantism and totalitarianism. It’s also easy to see why a regime sliding back towards autocracy would have no interest in doing it. If they were competent, they could have continued pretending they cared and actually use it as a propaganda tool. Same with Radio Liberty and the others.
Who is supposed to defend liberty across the globe? Do you think the US has been doing that and should be doing that?
The point of OP was that the facts from the CIA can’t be trusted. That they can lie about the facts.