Gopher

Background

Gopher is an Internet search tool which was originally developed at the Univserity of Minnesota to provide an information network in a campus. The most powerful facility in the Gopher is a cataloguing scheme which contains information about the title of document, the type of document, the host of the Internet address, and a file path of the document. Those facilities enable users to locate and view information in an arbitrary way and provides users to access more types of information resources. In addition, Gopher is using a menu-based interface which is more user-friendly than a command-line input, and it also research information faster than ftp.

Using Gopher For Researching Visual Programming

Gopher is a text oriented tools with a folder structure. After a user traverses down to the resources, it is difficult to return back to the main catalogue especially if compared to the ease of return with the World Wide Web. Another disadvantage of Gopher is that it is difficult to research information, as seen by my attempt to research Visual Programming. First, I locate Gopher menu to research the phrase "Visual programming", the system does not return any related resources. Next, I try to use another Gopher searching tool known as VERONICA. Unfortunately, VERONICA also haven't found too much useful information. In this experience, I feel uncomfortable and discourage to use Gopher because the researching process is complicated and very slow. Finally, Gopher has a limitation for access resources of the Internet because the Gopher servers are non-stateless programs. One user opens a line and continue to use the connection until he finishes; while user is on-line, nobody else can be use the connection.