Copyright (c) 1993 Kevin Gamiel,CNIDR, and UNC-Chapel Hill Please send bugs and comments to Kevin.Gamiel@cnidr.org. The Gopher Book 1.1 5/23/93 Contents -------- 1 Introduction What is Gopher? What is Winsock? What is The Gopher Book? What is CNIDR? What about UNC-Chapel Hill? What's This About Copyright? Who's Responsible? Thank You! 2 Installation Requirements Installing The Gopher Book Troubleshooting 3 Application Layout and Operation The Book File Menu Bookmark Menu Options Menu Help Menu 1 Introduction -------------- What is Gopher? Gopher is a client-server based Internet Information Retrieval system developed by the University of Minnesota. The system provides clients with a heirachical view of the Internet and allows file retrieval and access to other services including WAIS, Telnet, and others. What is Winsock? Windows Sockets (Winsock) is an open specification for providing a common network Application Programming Interface (API) for Microsoft Windows. Historically, writing network applications for PCs with Windows has been a daunting task because of various vendor-specific protocol stacks. Major players from industry and the Internet community joined together to standardize the API, based on the Berkely Sockets paradigm used on UNIX systems. Today, the major vendors are either already shipping or will soon ship winsock.dll with their protocol stacks. With this file from your favorite vendor, any "Winsock compliant" network application will work! We fully support and applaud the work of the Winsockers. What is The Gopher Book? The simplicity of the Gopher protocol is the reason for its popularity on the net. In keeping with this simplicity, The Gopher Book is an attempt to superimpose the book paradigm, one we are all familiar with, onto the Gopher information system. Menus fetched from Gopher servers are presented as pages in the book. Each page can contain references to other pages, text files, image files, binary files, telnet sessions, and others. The user selects items from the page by double-clicking that item and the book either turns to a new page or retrieves the item, starting a user-defined application to 'view' that file or service. Bookmarks are provided to allow quick access to useful pages. What is CNIDR? CNIDR, the Clearinghouse for Networked Information Discovery and Retrieval, is supported primarily by the National Science Foundation and the MCNC Center for Communications to promote the use and development of NIDR systems. Initially focused on Wide Area Information Servers (WAIS), CNIDR broadened its scope to include NIDR systems in general. Gopher, World Wide Web, Z39.50, and Whois++ are examples of these systems. CNIDR MCNC Center for Communications Post Office Box 12889 3021 Cornwallis Road Research Triangle Park North Carolina 27709-2889 919-248-1499 fax 919-248-1405 e-mail info@cnidr.org What about UNC-Chapel Hill? An early implementor of the WAIS protocol, UNC's Office of Information Technology Development Group has actively supported the use and growth of various Internet information services including Gopher. The group has now gained global popularity though a cooperative project with Sun Microsystems called sunSITE. SunSITE is an international information depository currently consisting of software for all platforms, academic journals, Smithsonian photo archives, and much more. The site was recently chosen as an official electronic information repository for the White House! SunSITE superscedes traditional archives by providing WAIS and Gopher access, as well as ftp. Point your Gopher to sunsite.unc.edu, port 70 and have fun! What's This About Copyright? This software can be used freely and redistributed in its entirety. No portion of this software can, without the permission of the author, be sold for any reason. This software is provided as-is and the copyright owners bear absolutely no responsibility as to the operation of this software. Who's Responsible? Kevin Gamiel CNIDR 919-248-1499 UNC-Chapel Hill 919-962-9107 Kevin.Gamiel@cnidr.org Thank You! This application wouldn't be possible without the contributions of the following folks: University of Minnesota Netmanage, Inc. Lanera, Inc. Microsoft, Inc. The Winsock crew 2 Installation -------------- Requirements - Microsoft Windows 3.x - Wingding fonts! If this font isn't installed in Windows, the user will not see descriptive icons beside Gopher page items, rather a senseless, but consistant,character. - Windows Sockets (Winsock) TCP/IP protocol stack 1.1 or later Installing The Gopher Book 1) Copy GOPHBOOK.ZIP to an appropriate directory 2) Execute PKUNZIP.EXE -d GOPHBOOK.ZIP. A subdirectory named GOPHBOOK will be created containing the files indicated in GOPHBOOK.TXT 3) From the Windows Program Manager, select 'File', 'New'. 4) Select 'Group Item' and create a group named "Gopher Book 1.1" 5) Again select 'File', 'New'. 6) Select 'Program Item' and enter the following information: Description: The Gopher Book 1.0 Command Line: \GOPHBOOK\TBOOK.EXE GOPHER11.TBK Working Dir: \GOPHBOOK Shortcut: None 7) Double click on the icon and start Gophering! Troubleshooting Q) I get the message "Failed to Initialize Winsock!" when I start? A) You don't have a Winsock compliant TCP/IP stack, the stack is not installed properly, or is less than version 1.1. This application is useless without Winsock installed and therefore it exits when not properly installed. Q) When I retrieve a text or image file, I get a "no such file" error message? A) Enter the full file specifications for the text or image viewer in the Options/Configure dialog box. For example, "c:\windows\notepad.exe". Q) What is in the GOPHBOOK.INI file? A) This file contains configuration information for The Gopher Book. You can add your own by hand but BE CAREFUL! This should be done before starting the application because this file is only read at that time. The syntax is: For example: gopher.micro.umn.edu 70 c:\windows\notepad.exe c:\bin\ps.exe c:\netmanag\telnet.exe Q) What is in the BOOKMARK.INI file? A) This file contains all pertinant information needed to maintain Gopher objects, ie bookmarks. You can add your own by hand but BE CAREFUL! This should be done before starting the application because this file is only read at that time. The syntax is: ,,,, For example: 1,Sunsite.unc.edu,,sunsite.unc.edu,70 3 Application Layout and Operation ---------------------------------- The Book When the book is closed, a double mouse click anywhere on the cover begins the Gopher session. At this point, the books attempts to retrieve the Gopher menu from the server indicated in the Options:Configure dialog box. Assuming no errors, the book then opens. The right page of the book contains a text description of the current Gopher page and a list box containing the items on that page. The left page contains only an icon of a book flipping its pages. By double-clicking anywhere on the left page the user can traverse through previously visited pages. File Menu Exit Restart Gopher This menu item is useful if you change your default Gopher server via the configuration menu or if you just want to start over again in a familiar place. Bookmark Menu Go to Displays a dialog box containing the current bookmarks. The user then selects a bookmarked page to turn to. Place Choosing this menu will set a bookmark on the current page. Remove Displays a dialog box containing the current bookmarks. The user can then select 1 or more bookmarks to delete from the list. Options Menu Configure Dialog box indicating the root Gopher server and port as well as user-defined viewers for the various file types. View This Item Displays the Gopherese for the selected item. Help Menu Index Starts the default text editor with manual.txt About Who, what, when, where...