Date: Tue, 7 Feb 1995 10:12:06 -0600 From: BITNET list server at UA1VM (1.8a) Subject: File: "MAP19 LESSON" MAP19: GOPHER (PART TWO) "Nothing quite new is perfect." -- Cicero, Brutus There are three ways to enter Gopherspace: 1. through a Gopher client running on your local Internet service provider's machine, 2. through a telnet connection to a publicly-accessible Gopher site, or 3. through e-mail (we'll talk about e-mail access on Friday). How can you tell if your local Internet service provider has a Gopher client that you can use? Easy! Just type gopher at your system's command prompt, and watch what happens. If your provider has a Gopher client, your Gopher client's root menu will appear on your screen. If your site does *not* have a Gopher client, however, all you will see on your screen after you type "gopher" will be an error message. Fortunately, if you can't access Gopher through your local provider, you can always access Gopher through telnet. The following is a list adapted from the Gopher FAQ (1) and it lists the telnet addresses and logins for just a few of the publicly accessible Gopher sites: Telnet Address Login Area ------------------------- ------ ------------- consultant.micro.umn.edu gopher North America ux1.cso.uiuc.edu gopher North America panda.uiowa.edu panda North America gopher.msu.edu gopher North America gopher.ebone.net gopher Europe gopher.sunet.se gopher Sweden info.anu.edu.au info Australia tolten.puc.cl gopher South America ecnet.ec gopher Ecuador gan.ncc.go.jp gopher Japan Please use the site that is closest to you. Also, if you are in North America, please remember that the consultant.micro.umn.edu address is the most used Gopher address in the entire world (this is the address of the University of Minnesota's Gopher server -- the birthplace of Gopher). You might be better off if you telneted to another North American site. Also, if your site is running its own Gopher client software, it is *STRONGLY* recommended that you use your site's Gopher client software instead of telneting into the public logon sites. Your client is set up so that you can use custom features not available through a telnet connection (i.e. mouse, scroll bars, etc.). You will also find that your provider's Gopher client will run much faster than a telnet Gopher client (1). DIRECT CLIENT ACCESS TO REMOTE GOPHERS As I said above, to access your root Gopher menu, all that you have to do is type gopher at your system's command prompt. Sometimes, however, you may want to bypass your own root menu and connect directly to a remote Gopher server. You can do this by typing gopher at your system's command prompt, replacing with the the address of the remote Gopher server that you want to access. For example, to connect directly with the info.asu.edu Gopher I would type gopher info.asu.edu at my system's command prompt. LOCAL VERSUS DISTANT INFORMATION Spend any amount of time in Gopherspace, and you are bound to run into roadblocks. The most common roadblock that you will encounter is an error message that says Empty Menu; no items selected or nothing available when you try to access a file or menu that you *KNOW* exists (and that you may have even accessed just a few seconds earlier). One of the biggest mistakes that people make is they assume that this "Empty Menu" error is a problem with their local Internet service provider's system. IT ISN'T!! Your local Internet service provider is only responsible for the LOCAL portion of your Internet service. If you are having problems accessing a distant Gopher file or menu, your problem isn't with your local provider, it is with the distant site that you are trying to access! There are two things that you need to keep in mind any time you are having problems with Gopher: 1. Gopherspace is incredibly dynamic. Sites "appear" and and "disappear" every second of every day. Internet traffic, power outages, weather, scheduled repairs, and even squirrels affect whether a site is on-line or off-line. 2. Sites can "disappear" for as little as a second or they can shut down and disappear forever. If you are having problems accessing something in Gopherspace, wait a little while and try to access it later. UNIX GOPHER COMMANDS Once you access your Gopher client (or telnet into a Gopher client), take a look at the bottom of the root menu. If you see a menu line that says Press ? for Help, q to Quit, u to go up a menu You are using a UNIX Gopher client. Fortunately, the on-line help menu for the UNIX Gopher is really good. If you type ? your screen will fill with a whole bunch of UNIX Gopher commands. I'm not going to show you all of these commands -- you can find them pretty easily by typing "?" -- but I do want to show you a few of the most important commands that you will use: Key What it does ----------- ----------------------------------- Up arrow Moves the --> cursor up one line Down arrow Moves the --> cursor down one line Right arrow "Enters" the selected menu item or Return Left arrow "Exits" the item and returns you to or u the previous menu After you have entered a file and have gotten to the bottom of it, the following menu bar appears Press to continue, to mail, to save, or

to print Pressing "return" will just take you back to the previous menu. If you want a copy of the file, you are going to have to either press "m" or "s". If you are telneting into a Gopher client, or if the file is small, your best bet would be to type "m". The client will then ask you for an address you want the current document mailed to. Enter your full Internet e-mail address :) OTHER GOPHER CLIENT COMMANDS There are a whole bunch of different Gopher clients out there. Fortunately, they all work on the same basic principles, and they all have relatively good on-line help menus. Access your Gopher client, take a look at your help menu, and find the keys or commands necessary to: - Move the cursor up and down the screen - "Enter" files (select an item) - "Exit" files (go back to the previous menu) - Quit the program We'll talk about some of the more advanced commands later this week :) HOMEWORK: 1. Enter Gopherspace and play around :) 2. If you REALLY feel daring, you might want to find Richard Smith's "Navigating the Internet: Let's Go Gophern" workshop archives. The workshop was a one-month workshop which taught nothing but Gopher :) The following are some Gopher sites that I found that have the "Gophern" archives. You'll have to access these sites directly -- type "gopher " -- and then hunt around the site for the "Gophern" files. gopher-chem.ucdavis.edu gopher.kfki.hu ubvmsb.cc.buffalo.edu gopher2.nhm.ac.uk rc1.vub.ac.be wealaka.okgeosurvey1.gov gopher.keller.clarke.edu ukoln.bath.ac.uk gopher.ub2.lu.se utl.library.utoronto.ca SOURCES: (1) From the University of Minnesota's Gopher FAQ, last modified on 7/25/94 PATRICK DOUGLAS CRISPEN THE VIEWS EXPRESSED IN THIS LETTER DO NOT PCRISPE1@UA1VM.UA.EDU NECESSARILY REPRESENT THE VIEWS OF THE THE UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA - TUSCALOOSA ROADMAP: COPYRIGHT PATRICK CRISPEN 1994. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.