To use Gopher you make selections from a menu; if you select an item that represents a text file, Gopher will get it from wherever it is and display it on your screen. If you choose a menu item that represents another menu, Gopher will show you that menu; thus you can navigate through levels using only keystrokes or a mouse.
There are thousands of Gopher servers around the Internet. They have been set up by universities, departments, companies, by Swarthmore College, by the Geometry Forum. For example, the address of the Forum's Gopher is mathforum.org and its archives store articles, book reviews, abstracts of funded projects, lists of resources, software for the Mac and PC platforms, proceedings from conferences, and digests of past postings. (The Forum's Gopher server contains items of interest to the geometer at all levels, and has an "Other Gophers" folder with pointers to a number of sites of interest to educators, students, and researchers.)
When you launch (double-click on) TurboGopher, depending on its configuration you may first connect to a local server or the home Gopher server at the University of Minnesota. A Bookmarks window and a Home Server window will open, showing files and folders. You can navigate through gopherspace using TurboGopher by simply pointing at and double-clicking on icons with the mouse.
To get some idea of the numbers of Gopher servers there are in the global network, you could open (double-click on) an Other Gophers folder and navigate your way through a few of the folders inside it. The folder entitled North America might be a good place to start; organized by state, it will give you access to just about anywhere you wish to go.
Several windows representing simultaneous connections can be open at once (to move among them, you can click on any part of a non-active window, or choose from the pull-down Window menu). You may quit at any time by choosing Quit from the File menu.
To make a bookmark, highlight a folder or file and choose Set Bookmark from the Gopher menu. (You can't do this while reading the text of a file, but must close the text window and highlight its icon first.) You will be asked to give it a name and then press OK. You will then find a file/folder by this name in your Bookmarks window.
You can reference other gopher servers from your own Gopher site and poke around following the bookmarks that others have set up. Get in the habit of making bookmarks. Gopherspace being the enormous place it is, if you don't save interesting items to your bookmark list, you may never remember where it was you ran into them.
To use Veronica, locate its folder and open it. You will be presented with a two-part list, the first showing Veronica servers that will search all of gopherspace for files, and the second listing Veronica servers that will find directories (menus/folders). Double-click on one of the options (it's usually best to choose one close to you, but if you can't connect because it's too busy, choose another), enter a word to search for, and click OK. Veronica will locate items that contain the word(s) you specify and will display them on your screen in the same form as a regular Gopher menu.
If your search is too general, you'll get a huge list of entries; try to restrict it somewhat. Searching on geometry yields a very large number of entries. If you're too specific, however, you may get nothing: while math jokes yields a file, geometry jokes does not.
A search on sketchpad yields a number of entries having to do with the Geometer's Sketchpad and many choices of sketches, along with entries about another Sketchpad system designed for sketching on CAD pictures as background, etc.
Examples:
When you specify two words, Veronica assumes you are using and. If you search on math equation you will be shown all the file and folder names that include both the word "math" and the word "equation," just as if you had asked for math and equation.
If you use or to search on math or equation, you will get all of the menu items that contain either the word "math" or the word "equation" (a very long list; think carefully before you call on Veronica to perform such a search).
Use parentheses to cause Veronica to treat more than one word as if it were one: to find all the items containing the word "math" and at least one of the words "equation" or "problem," search for math and (equation or problem). This is equivalent to searching on math (equation or problem).
If you want all the entries that contain the words "math problem" but not the word "equation," specify math problem not equation.
You can use an asterisk character (*) to search or not search for words that are similar: for items that contain the word "mathematics" as well as the word "math," but not the words "problem" or "problems," ask for math* not problem*.
TurboGopher is set to debinhex files automatically, and to open archives after debinhexing. After debinhexing it will present you with the option of opening the retrieved file. If a file is compressed, TurboGopher will go find the default extractor for the compression used, launch it, and tell it to work on your just retrieved file. The defaults are set in the Preferences. TurboGopher assumes, as do most Mac file transfer programs, that you will have StuffIt Expander, a free decompressor for most compression types.
After the file has been decompressed, it will be ready to be run or read. (Now all you have to do is remember where it is on your drive.)
Above your Veronica window, you will first see the status message Decoding Binhex file, and in a moment you will be asked either to accept the suggested name or to supply a substitute name, and to choose where you want the file stored on your computer. Make these choices and press Return.
The file will now begin to transfer, and you'll see a status message showing the number of bytes being processed. WAIT.
When the file has arrived on your computer, you will see the status message Finished decoding BinHexed file "Disinfectant.sit.hqx" (the .sit extension indicates that this file has been compressed using StuffIt).
TurboGopher now presents you with the option to Open the compressed file. Click on the Open button and TurboGopher will launch StuffIt Expander to decompress the file. You will be returned to TurboGopher when the file has been decompressed. (The TurboGopher window will still be there asking if you want to Open the file; just close the window without clicking on Open.)
In this case the compressed file was 156K, and the decompressed program 350K.
Voila--free software!
Notes
(1) "It happens that Minnesota is known as the Gopher State. For example, the sports teams at the main campus of the University of Minnesota are named the Golden Gophers. No one knows exactly why Minnesota is the Gopher State--the most widely accepted theory is that the inventor of Minne sota (Phineas T. Bushbottom) actually resembled a rodent--still, there it is.
(2) "The name Archie was used for the Anonymous FTP searching tool because it sounds like the word 'archive'. . . in the comics, Archie has several friends, including Veronica and Jughead . . . Veronica [was chosen] for the Gopher search tool. . . . there is no truth to the rumor that the name Veronica really stands for 'Very Easy Rodent-Oriented Netwide Index to Computerized Archives'. Nor does the name Jughead [similar to Veronica but for searching only one area of gopherspace] really mean 'Jonzy's Universal Gopher Hierarchy Excavation and Display'. You will see these long names, but they were contrived after the fact. This may be disappointing to those people who love cryptic acronyms, but as one of our readers, we thought you deserve to know the real truth."
--Ibid., p. 457.
Moreover, there is a serendipitous associa tion between the name 'Gopher' and the American slang expression 'gofer'. This epithet describes a person whose position in life is not unlike that of a Gopher client: to go for this and go for that.
In the charming argot of the American midwest, 'go for' becomes 'gofer' which becomes 'Gopher'. Indeed, this is probably why so many tourists are astonished to find, upon visiting Minnesota, that the natives are so cooperative when it comes to running errands for other people."
--The Internet Complete Reference, Harley Hahn & Rick Stout, Osborne McGraw-Hill, 1994, pp. 434-435.
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Sarah Seastone
sarah@mathforum.org
November 27, 1994