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[Knezzen]

Some info about our little place in Gophersphere.
Reach it at gopher://gopher.macos9lives.com using your favourite client of choice or through the Floodgap Public Gopher Proxy using your regular web browser. Remember that traffic is proxied and downloads are much slower than downloading directly through Gopher or Hotline.

Gopher is a internet protocol that predates HTTP and what we think is the "Wold Wide Web" today. It's plain text only, so it's very well suited to older machines and a "no fuzz" approach to information. For anyone interested in the origins and how it works from a technical point of view, there's a nice article about Gopher on Wikipedia.

All files available on Hotline are available on Gopher as well, so you can choose either one for getting to our downloads.

So why do we do this? Is it to make everything horrible for everyone? No. We want some kind of security (as in stuff not able to be crawled by lawyers, bots and whatnot). We do this by using well documented protocols not being used by the general public anymore and hence we have the downloads "public" but at the same time not "public".

[Jubadub]

As a heads up to others trying to access this, make sure to copy and paste the Gopher URL: gopher://gopher.macos9lives.com

The BBCode used to make hyperlinks ([url] tags) appends "http://" in the beginning of any URL that does not specify either HTTP, HTTPS or FTP, and it trims any other instances of ":", so "gopher://gopher.macos9lives.com" becomes "http://gopher//gopher.macos9lives.com".

Classilla accesses Gopher pages the same way it does with HTTP and HTTPS pages, by the way, so using it on Mac OS 9 is completely transparent. I suspect many other Mac OS 9 browsers also work?

[IIO]

i made a screenshot for the hotline:// integration into IE 5 before, and found that the gopher:// protocol helper setting is built-in by default. you only have to select a client if you have multiple installed.

[Knezzen]

Classilla accesses Gopher pages the same way it does with HTTP and HTTPS pages, by the way, so using it on Mac OS 9 is completely transparent. I suspect many other Mac OS 9 browsers also work?

All versions of Netscape supports Gopher out of the box