A very sad day approaches.

Those of you old enough to remember Gopher may proceed to shed a quiet, ASCII-art tear. Gopher document type 0.

For those of you that don’t know what Gopher is, here’s my quick summary:

* It existed before the web.
* It is an extremely simple protocol designed to be an Internet-wide filesystem, though the bit that let you mount the Internet like a disk never quite happened, though still could. (actually I think I saw a FUSE gopher implementation recently)
* It pretty much does everything that WAP does, but about 50 times simpler. Why smartphones invented WAP instead of just using Gopher is still a mystery to me.
* XML-RPC is usually extreme overkill when you could use a simple protocol like Gopher

Now how many of you remember Veronica and Archie?