The unique Gopher arrangements were taken as public in the year 1991 and you can view its depiction from the RFC 1436. This protocol was given the almost same name as of the sport’s team of Minnesota University, “Golden Gophers”.
The TCP/IP Application layer protocol “Gopher” was launched to share out, uncover, and to process documents online. Though initially, it was opened for communal as a smart option against WWW (World Wide Web) because of its menu documentation support, but in due course it remained completely futile to receive any popularity. The reason behind this infamy was that it offered some non maintainable, by the Web, features. According to one school of thought, the reason of this protocol’s collapse was its some degree of structure too and that was its non-flexibility especially when compared it to Hypertext Transfer Protocol or HTML, which is Gopher’s real competitor.
Gopher each document has a definite layout as well as a type. That’s why; common user is required to navigate all the way through a lone server-defined list of options system in order to dig up a particular manuscript. Previously, it was perfect for the text oriented computing environment. But text based menu interface, associated with Gopher, is really simple to use. And that simplicity is the real thing which makes possible a range of client’s implementations.
Gopher Uniqueness
Today’s Gopher versions are inserted multimedia support. Because of less network resources usage, Gopher has become most preferable protocol of the network administrators. So it provides a faster and efficient system with simple syntax besides straightforward organization. But for those users, with Web browsers which are not Gopher supportive, either fully or partially can have access to those contents residing over the Gopher’s servers with the help of a server gateway. In this regard, proxy servers can alter the Gopher set of choices into HTML codes.
Gopher from functional point of view comes into observation as a global network file system with mountable read-only characteristic. Though, it is consisted of a series of hierarchical hyperlink-able opportunities listing. But it is the responsibility of a server’s administrator to control the selection of items that are available via menu and titles. As this protocol was worked as a system to view and put in order the text files prior to the World Wide Web. Therefore, documents in that protocol could be inspected from the far-flung computer systems by means of Gopher applications.
But two programs “Veronica” and “Jughead” incorporation with Gopher were became the reason of this protocol popularity, as an information providing tool. And it is because of these programs, Gophers can make hunt of every one Gopher file across the globe. Its effectiveness can be judged from that Gopher is using a server-client code of behavior so it can access and run the files. Gopher client is needed TCP port number 70 in order to hook up to the Gopher server. But server throws files listing with standard codes to identify the files type. Number 0 is fixed for files, while number 1 is used for directories. Besides this, number 7 is used for the search services.