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Happy Macs Gopher Site Back Online

Summary: After a lengthy and initially undetected outage, the Happy Macs Gopher site is back "on the air" once more. This post provides additional information about the site and about how to access it from both vintage and modern Macs.

Post Body: I am pleased to announce that the Happy Macs Gopher site, gopher://happymacs.ddns.net, is back online after a lengthy outage related to ISP issues and to an upgrade of both the base software of the site and the Gopher server that runs there. The site also sports a refreshed appearance as well.

A screen shot of the updated Happy Macs Gopher site, as presented by the phetch Gopher client, appears below:

Happy Macs Gopher Site Screen Shot

To access the Happy Macs Gopher site from your modern Mac, get the Gophie gopher client from gophie.org and point it to happymacs.ddns.net.

You may also wish to check out the Terminal-based phetch Gopher client for your modern Mac. Phetch can be obtained at gopher://phkt.io/1/phetch/.

For your vintage Mac, get Turbo Gopher right here at www.retro-computing.com, from the Mac OS 68K or Mac OS PPC software archives and again, point your selected client to happymacs.ddns.net.

Turbo Gopher Gopher Client

If you are on a Windows platform, there is a version of Gophie available for Windows as well. You can download it from the same place (gophie.org).

Finally, if you are really in the vintage spirit and are on a DOS platform, check out the Gopherus DOS Gopher client! You will need a pre-existing Ethernet NIC and the associated packet driver to use Gopherus. Gopherus can be obtained at http://www.retro-computing.com in the DOS archive, or at its home site, gopherus.sourceforge.net.

If you are scratching your head wondering what the heck this Gopher stuff is, the quick answer is that before there was HTTP and web sites, there was Gopher and Gopher holes. There are many similar concepts between HTTP and Gopher (structured content, linked pages, etc.), but Gopher is an infinitely simpler, faster and more elegant solution to the problem of publishing content online.

A more detailed answer to the question “what the heck is Gopher?” can be found right here at Quadras, Cubes and G5s, in the posts i-logout.cz, A Mac Software Repository in Gopherspace and A Little More on Gopher.

Happy Gophering!