From: ulbrich@informatik.uni-ulm.de (Jan Ulbrich)
Subject: SerialGopher QA
Keywords: gopher
Organization: University of Ulm, Germany
Date: Thu, 21 Jan 93 10:11:39 GMT

Hello,

Thanks for your interest on SerialGopher. Here are answers to a few  
questions
I was asked.

Thanks for more questions and have a nice day, Jan

///  Jan Ulbrich -- flynn (remember tron?)
o-o  student at University of Ulm, Germany
 L
 _   address: ulbrich@informatik.uni-ulm.de

------- >8 ---------- >8 ------------ >8 --------------- >8  
-----------------

Q: Why we don't use SLIP for our Gopher-server. 
A: Two reasons:
   o The weaker one: There are only very few universities in germany  
you can
   access via SLIP - by now - and a free SLIP access for EVERYONE is  
not
   in sight.

   o More important for us: We wanted to write an independent system  
for
   presentation of data found on a server using an existing protocol  
to
   give our clients a good start. You can use our clients to access  
ordinary
   Gopher-servers via TCP/IP or SLIP and you can use them to form a  
serial
   connection to our server-software running with special gateways on  
computers
   that work as BBS or fido-box or even as a Internet-gateway - if  
you don't
   have SLIP. With gateways written for these and other systems you  
can melt
   the different BBS to one virtual server.

   I hope this makes our idea clearer: We want to leave the  
high-performance
   infrastructure you have on the Internet to give people without  
access to
   the Internet the possibility to start an own server an a PC,  
Amiga, Atari ST
   or something even worse, using the Gopher-protocol. A system that  
is better
   than videotext and even cheaper. And to hit the political aspect:  
If you give
   access to the Internet to everyone, it will break down. But  
everyone should 
   have access to powerful information-systems - in reading and  
writing.

---

Q: Why did you do this? In the Unix world, a user with software  
supporting 
   VT100 emulation from their home can dial into any gopher server  
through 
   their account on that machine and run gopher (as opposed to  
xgopher). 
A: We want to support also people who are not familiar with  
computers:
   You can't make them work with VT100 clients and we dont't want  
them to learn
   how to download and to convert data to get it finally displayed on  
their
   computer. To hit the political aspect: Everyone should have access  
to 
   powerful information-systems - wirehead or not.

---

Q: ... Unix gopher
   servers (and other types of gopher servers) probably need some  
enhancements
   to deal with data types specifically for Macintoshes (and other  
machines?).
A: There is no need to enhance a gopher-server to match our idea. We  
only 
   changed the way, gateways are supported. You need no  
machine-specific data 
   types, but a good presentation of the types that are possible by  
now - for 
   this you can't use a VT100-client.

---

Q: As for BBSs, all you need is some knowledge of what is on each  
BBS, but
   that could be better integrated (through gopher, or whatever).
A: What you mention needs a bootstrap: You need to know what you are  
looking 
   for and you need to know where to search. Thats no  
informationsystem, but 
   a filesystem.


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