Text File

Welcome to the gopher server at quux.org!

This is one of the world's few maintained, modern gopher servers. On it, you will find a huge collection of information, files, software, archives, and mirrors pertaining to a wide variety of topics of interest to computer enthusiasts. You'll find humor, jargon files, ZCode games and interpreters, decompressors for both modern and old compression formats, emulators for old CPUs, and even the occasional old operating system.

quux.org exists to provide a repository of some of the best software and documents in the history of computing, and the tools necessary to use it. The influence of games such as Zork can still be seen in the gaming industry today. And experience gained in the early days of computing still is relevant today -- in fact, some experience in those days can't be gained on modern equipment.

Another use for this collection is running old software. A program's age does not mean it is not useful; sometimes you might want to try out that old binary you have lying about from the PDP-11 or Apple II!

Finally, computer programmers (also known as hackers) wrote a great deal about their work. Some is legendary, such as Dijkstra's "Goto Considered Harmful" paper. Others are funny and equally as well-known. There is much here to chuckle at as well.

---------- WHY GOPHER ----------

I am often asked why I use gopher for this server, presumably as opposed to something such as HTTP. One important reason is that HTTP (and the Web) did not exist at the time that most of the content here was written. Using some flashy JavaScript code seems at odds with the atmosphere of the quux.org collection. Modern web browsers still understand Gopher and can still access this server. Since such browsers are ubiqutous today, accessing the site should not be a problem.

Contrary to popular belief, gopher can be used to serve up web (HTML) documents just as easily as HTTP can. You'll notice that some material originated in HTML form, and where changing it to plain text would be detrimental to the state of the source, it has been left in HTML. In most cases, you can browse that HTML, even with embedded multimedia, right from a gopher-enabled web browser.

Finally, gopher has a few unique features not found in HTTP. One of them is a standardized way of presenting a directory. HTTP cannot do this; HTTP servers generate HTML in a nonstandard way to accomplish this task. Another is multiple views of an object (along with mime types), but as this is a gopher+ feature and few web browsers implement gopher+ properly, I do not use this feature on quux.org.

Take a look at the Mozilla screenshot in the Gopher Project area. You'll see something that you'll never see with the Web -- a tree-like folder display, with items from multiple servers around the world integreated into a single directory hierarchy, SEAMLESSLY! Gopher is the only standardized commonplace global hierarchial virtual filesystem in existance today.

------------ A LEGAL NOTE ------------

This server is, first and foremost, a repository of data gathered from around the 'net. A large chunk of the data here is in the form of a "mirror" -- that is, a simple copy of data that resides (or, sadly, "resided") on computers elsewhere on the Internet. The original archive maintainer was responsible for the content of each individual archive. EDITORIAL CONTROL IS NOT EXERCISED on this server. Many directories are automatically generated. Even I have only read a fraction of the content here. Most mirrors live under /Archive/mirrors, though they may be linked to from other places.

That said, I attempt to run this server in a fully law-abiding way. Please notify me immediately if there is any question as to the legality of content available from here.

-- John Goerzen <jgoerzen@complete.org> quux.org archive maintainer August 22, 2000 August 29, 2001 April 1, 2002