The Archive has an assembled collection of Gopherspace

[mostakimvip06]

It was inevitable that constant-update paradigms would become dominant on the Web: you start a program and it does something and suddenly you’re using version 54.01 instead of version 53.85. If you’re lucky, there might be a “changes” list, but that luck might be variant because many simply write “bug fixes”. In these updates are the closing of serious performance or security issues – and as someone who knows the days when you might have to mail in for a floppy disk to be sent in a few weeks to make your program work, I can totally get behind the new “we fixed it before you knew it was broken” world we live in. Everything does this: phones, game consoles, laptops, even routers and medical equipment.

But along with this shifting of versions comes the occasional telemarketing data fundamental change in what browsers do, along with making some aspect of the Web obsolete in a very hard-lined way.

Take, for example, Gopher, a (for lack of an easier description) proto-web that allowed machines to be “browsed” for information that would be easy for users to find. The ability to search, to grab files or writings, and to share your own pools of knowledge were all part of the “Gopherspace”. It was also rather non-graphical by nature and technically oriented at the time, and the graphical “WWW” utterly flattened it when the time came.

Until it didn’t.

Microsoft, citing security concerns, dropped Gopher support out of its Internet Explorer browser in 2002. Mozilla, after a years-long debate, did so in 2010. Here’s the Mozilla Firefox debate that raged over Gopher Protocol removal. The functionality was later brought back externally in the form of a Gopher plugin. Chrome never had Gopher support. (Many other browsers have Gopher support, even today, but they have very, very small audiences.)

material here. From this material, as well as other sources, there are web-enabled versions of Gopherspace (basically, that bring back some aspects of Gopher, if only to allow for a nostalgic stroll. But nobody would dream of making something brand new in that protocol, except to prove a point or for the technical exercise. The lens has refocused.

In the present, Flash is beginning a slow, harsh exile into the web pages of history – browser support dropping, and even Adobe whittling away support and upkeep of all of Flash’s forward-facing projects. Flash was a very big deal in its heyday – animation, menu interface, games, and a whole other host of what we think of as “The Web” depended utterly on Flash, and even specific versions and variations of Flash. As the sun sets on this technology, attempts to be able to still view it like the Shumway project will hopefully allow the lens a few more years to be capable of seeing this body of work.