As those of you with Gopher clients have probably already discovered, the University of Illinois runs a wonderful Gopher server that they call the Weather Machine. Here is the story behind that server. This new resource was quickly embraced, and a large number of meteorological products were developed by graduate students and programmers at the department, for distribution throughout the campus. As use of the system grew, so did our concern over questions of access control, accounting, and maintenance.
Gopher offers an extremely flexible, intuitive method for sharing information.
Items are stored and retrieved using a familiar hierarchical menu structure. The information it contains is now available off campus as well. A wide range of information is stored on the Weather Machine. The Gopher server is updated using a combination of scripts and programs which run automatically on the Weather Machine. The LDM passes weather reports to locally developed programs that process and name the reports and file them in appropriate locations.