GopherCON '94 State of Gopher Address 1994 State of the Gopher Mark P. McCahill, Farhad Anklesaria, and the Internet Gopher Team University of Minnesota gopher@boombox.micro.umn.edu

Overview -How we got here -How we spent the last year -Current trends and the future

How we got here 1991: Pre-history and birth of gopher 1992: Growth and Gopher+ design 1993: Gopher+ deployment and refinement

1991: The first Gopher -Open-ended/extensible system -Minimal user training -Great user interface for novices -Access to most popular Internet services via gopher -Minimal bandwidth requirements -Internet Duct Tape/Convenience store

1992: Growth and Gopher+ -Gopher gateways to WAIS, ftp, Netnews, X.500, etc. -Gopher becomes a normal way to publish information on the Internet -Limits of the initial protocol become apparent Needed a place to store meta-information Administrator Electronic forms Alternate data formats (views) Modification date Abstract

1993: Gopher+ deployment -Vigorously suggested that MIME-style content types be used for alternate views. Gopher+ protocol changed to use MIME content types this is implemented in our clients -July 1993 - released production versions of Mac, Unix, and PC gopher+ clients with alternate view and electronic forms support; Unix gopher+ server -By December 1993 about 1/3 of gopherspace uses gopher+ servers -Bulk of the new server registrations are gopher+

Meet the Gopher team... Paul Lindner -SQL gateway -Unix client and server enhancements -Unix Gopher security bugfixes -Gopher Gateway made Gopher+ aware -Gopher to Netfind gateway

...meet the Gopher team Bob Alberti -Gopherizing government census data into Gopher via Oracle SQL server -Cleaned up and automated gopherizing of the Current Contents database -Gopher to ftp gateway -Gopher MUD registry

...meet the Gopher team David Johnson -Macintosh Gopher Surfer -Full-text search for Mac gopher servers via AppleSearch gateway -Rewrite of Macintosh TurboGopher client for PowerPC and OpenDoc

...meet the Gopher team Danny Iacovou -New recruit to the gopher team -Gateway from Gopher to 1992 revision of Z39.50

...meet the Gopher team Earl Schleske / George Gonzalez / Kim Pearson -PC-DOS Minuet client (an integrated Gopher+, e-mail, telnet client) -Minuet is the replacement for PC Gopher III

...meet the Gopher team Michele Hu & Liz Wendland The newest recruits to the development team

Today's problems Bytes moved across NSFnet backbone on Gopher's assigned port (port 70)

Growing usage -Because half the gopher servers are run on ports other than port 70, the NSFnet traffic statistics underestimate gopher usage by a factor of 2 -20% per month growth rate eventually strains resources -We need to spread the load so popular servers and gateways are not a single point of failure. Replicating information across the network will be vital this year -Servers may start giving higher priority to requests from sites that are mirrors or dynamic caches

URLs, URNs and Gopher -Uniform Resource Locators provide a way around the Gopher gateway bottleneck problem -Our gateways are going to start returning URLs so that savvy clients can fetch the resource directly -Our Gopher clients will emit and accept URLs as defined by the IETF -We are tracking URN developments and will deploy a pilot URN to URL mapping service for gopher clients

...today's problems -Searches and indexes of gopherspace are an important navigational aid -VERONICA and the new Archie become more important as gopherspace gets larger -Public access VERONICA/Archie servers are very busy -Harvesting from about 6700 servers is a challenge... and we register around 25 new servers a week

Gopher's place in the world -Think of how books are structured Table of contents: Gopher Content: documents and multimedia (in a variety of data formats and page description languages) Index: WAIS, Archie, VERONICA -Gopher is a system that does not disenfranchise users with slow machines or network connections

Performance and Bandwidth Typical home Gopher Server directory: 2k - 6k Default Mac Mosaic home page: 35k NCSA home page: 70k University of Illinois home page: 100k Global Network Navigator home page: 57k

User experience & slow links -Gopher is not a network pig... -Hypertext is useful as one type of document ...but relying on nothing but a mass of unstructured hypertext is not our best hope for the future -Gopher is an excellent solution for structuring an information space

Trends and the future -Most applications are in the process of becoming Internet-aware -The URL concept makes all applications look like hypertext: your mailer, your word processor, your newsreader... -Expect a proliferation of network-aware page description languages and data formats

...Trends and the future -Apple's OpenDoc and Microsoft OLE document architectures will easily accommodate references to networked resources -A distinct possibility that Adobe Acrobat will soon support references to networked resources -Gopher supports many different kinds of multimedia content types; we are not married to any particular data format or page description language

Client software architectures -It will always be a multi-protocol world -Monolithic network applications have limited future -A monolithic application is a large, cumbersome swiss-army knife (would you repair your car or build a house with a swiss army knife?) -Small, specialized, communicating applications will have an advantage -Technologies like OLE and OpenDoc will let the users decide which applications to plug into their personalized frames

Monolithic app: Mac Mosaic Consider the gopher capabilities of Mosaic -Only the most basic gopher support -Lacks Gopher+ features such as item attributes, alternate views, and electronic forms -Virtually nonexistent backgrounding capability

...Mac Mosaic Retrieving 1MB gopher directory on a Centris 650 across ethernet TurboGopher 13 seconds Mac Mosaic 1800 seconds (30 minutes!) -Mosaic used over 3 MB of RAM to hold a 1MB directory -Mosaic could launch a real Gopher client (but doesn't) -TurboGopher would be happy to launch Mosaic to render HTML but Mosaic can't acept Finder open events on such documents

More comparisons Retrieving 800K binhex file Fetch (using ftp): 40 seconds Mac Mosaic (using its ftp mode): 60 seconds TurboGopher (via gopher): 18 seconds

Future Architecture -Many application protocols, and continued protocol development -Modular protocol-specific client software which plugs into a user-interface framework -Many network-aware page description languages that work with plug-in protocol modules -We should be trying to do a few things really well instead of everything poorly

Plenty of change in three years -Much faster desktop CPUs (PowerPC and Pentium) -Much more content available on the net -But we are still living with the same tired old user interface metaphors -Can't we do any better?

Why 3-D gopherspace? -People navigate through 3-D space all the time -Providing a stronger sense of place and better landmarks will help users navigate -Virtual worlds (3-D gopherspace) gives us more possibilities for visual and aural cues that documents are closely (or distantly) related

...why 3-D Gopherspace? -Social intelligence cues can easily be coded into 3-D space... popular items might appear worn and the beaten path can be made explicit -We need to facilitate both finding information and finding people -A new user interface metaphor will let us build richer systems that incorporate interpersonal interaction (imagine hybrid Gopher / IRC / MUD systems)

But is this really feasible? -3-D gopherspace does not have to be a network pig -We can trade intelligence in the client for bandwidth; the client generates the scenes itself -Affordable desktop systems (PowerPC/Pentium) are now becoming fast enough to render virtual worlds on the fly -...And it is worth doing because virtual worlds will give us better metaphors for describing the massive quantity of resources on the net

How might it look? video goes here...

Summary -Our strategy is snap-together modular components -A component approach doesn't preclude a seamless user interface - look at the GINA software -Components will let us explore new user interface metaphors and emerging technologies such as OLE and OpenDoc -Gopher continues to be the best way to organize and navigate the Internet

Hot tips for the conference -Check out the blue skies gopher... it is coooool! -The quality/reliability discussions are very important is we are to continue to stay ahead of user demands -Check out the SQL and X.500 use of gopher electronic forms... you can do lightweight authentication today, and you don't have to use a filesystem for Gopher backend storage