All of Gopherspace as a single download

In 2007, John Goerzen scraped every gopher site he could find (gopher was a menu-driven text-only precursor to the Web; I got my first online gig programming gopher sites). He saved 780,000 documents, totalling 40GB. Today, most of this is offline, so he's making the entire archive available as a .torrent file; the compressed data is only 15GB. Wanna host the entire history of a medium? Here's your chance!

There are some plans to potentially host this archive publicly in the manner of archive.org; we'll have to wait and see if anything comes of it.
Finally, I have tried to find a place willing to be a permanent host of this data, and to date have struck out. If anybody knows of such a place, please get in touch. I regret that so many Gopher sites disappeared before 2007, but life is what it is, and this is the best snapshot of the old Gopherspace that I'm aware of and would like to make sure that this piece of history is preserved.

Download A Piece of Internet History (via Waxy)

Previously:

I write books. My latest is a YA science fiction novel called Homeland (it's the sequel to Little Brother). More books: Rapture of the Nerds (a novel, with Charlie Stross); With a Little Help (short stories); and The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow (novella and nonfic). I speak all over the place and I tweet and tumble, too.

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Cheaplazymom

OK, for the record, I have no idea what a Gopher site is, but that is not going to stop me from commenting. I freely admit to being a code moron so I will apologize in advance if my suggestion is idiotic. What about the Library of Congress? Seems to me if they are interested in the Twitter archive, Gopher history may be worthy as well.
Anonymous

I fondly remember installing gopher servers for faculty members back in the day, telling them they needed to consider migrating to the web instead. Many didn’t want to hear about this newfangled world wide web thing. I’d then install Mosaic 1.0 without telling them (the entire mosaic app fit on a single floppy), and that would open their eyes. Wikipedia has a nice article at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_(protocol) that includes several still living gopher servers, which can be viewed in a web browser using the gopher:// protocol.
Anonymous

i wonder if my own gopher site is archived in this
Uncle Geo

Internet Archive?
http://www.archive.org/
dculberson

It’s hard to believe there were that many Gopher sites still available in 2007.
librarybob1

You might want to try the Library of Congress. They just agreed to archive the Twitterverse … why not a measely 40GB?
Anonymous

I have fond memories of using gopher before the emergence of the web. I thought the hypertext links were absolutely brilliant. A couple of years later I figured out how to set up an emulated slip/PPP (slirp) connection to my university’s dial up system. My days of using a terminal to explore the internet were largely over.
matisse

The gopher site started by The WELL (Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link) is available via http at: http://www.well.com/gopher/

A little history of it is on my blog at http://twoalpha.blogspot.com/2006/04/well-gopher.html
matisse

By the way, does this sound familiar:

“The battle is about who will build, own, use and pay for the high-speed data highways of the future and whether their content will be censored.”

Roger Karraker wrote that in his 1991 article, “Highways of the Mind” and the article is still relevant today. Have a look.
http://www.well.com/gopher/Communications/Highways_of_the_Mind.txt
Anonymous

Amazon will gladly host it for you on their Public Data Sets service (http://aws.amazon.com/publicdatasets/).
Anonymous

I can host this until further notice if it helps, I’m on 10/10mbit connection, so as long as the load dosn’t totally bottleneck my connection, I’ve got no objections :)
rebdav

what about phlogs, I am glad firefox still lets me access these the 4d2 phlog lets you post comments via telnet.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phlog
or
gopher://gopher.4d2.org/1/phlog/page1/
rebdav

what about phlogs, I am glad firefox still lets me access these the 4d2 phlog lets you post comments via telnet.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phlog
or
gopher://gopher.4d2.org/1/phlog/page1/
Anonymous

Oh man. I remember Gopher, we used to use that all the time. Got on it through ClarisWorks if I remember correctly.
Anonymous

Hooray for the University of Minnesota! Go Gophers!
aaddrick

I never used it but I am willing to donate bandwidth and space for hosting. It’d be pretty awesome to host a part of history.
cory

Wow, I signed up for my classes at Cal using gopher. I wonder how many UC Berkeley course catalogs are in there.
Ambiguity

I’m glad Firefox still supports gopher, even if the Internet doesn’t!
Anonymous

How about the Library of Congress? They might be interested.
JohnCJ

My god. I just realized my porn directory is larger than the entire gophernet.
jokel

Does anyone have an idea what the copyright status of this archive and its contents is? Just curiousâ€¦