myfl.uk · gopher

This is not a web page. It is a menu.

Gopherspace is still there. This page is a hole dug in it, and you are reading it in a browser because the web won the protocol war and this domain keeps its hole on the winning protocol. Every line below is a real gopher selector line in the format of RFC 1436. The item types are real. The ports say 443. That is the history of the nineties in one field.

Connected to myfl.uk, port 443. Selector: (root).
iWelcome to myfl.uk. You are in gopherspace, reached over HTTP.fake (NULL) 0
iItem types follow RFC 1436. The ports say 443, because that is the protocol that won.fake (NULL) 0
iGopher clients listen on port 70. This hole does not: it is not a gopher server, it is a menu a browser drew.fake (NULL) 0
0About this hole/about myfl.uk 443
0Field notes/notes myfl.uk 443
1Experiments (20 items)/experiments myfl.uk 443
0A page that contains itself/quine myfl.uk 443
0The weighing of the heart/confession myfl.uk 443
0The time-signal station/wwv myfl.uk 443
0The Principality of myfl.uk/republic myfl.uk 443
0A page that appears when you leave/away myfl.uk 443
0The numbers station/station myfl.uk 443
0The end of the world, filed as tickets/terminus myfl.uk 443
0The slowest concert/slowest myfl.uk 443
0Sol time, the calendar Kodak used/sol myfl.uk 443
0The card punch, a form that sends nothing/punchcard myfl.uk 443
0The Daily Solidus, the site as a broadsheet/edition myfl.uk 443
0A search engine that only searches itself/search myfl.uk 443
0The minute, a page that exists one minute a day/minute myfl.uk 443
0The attention shop/shop myfl.uk 443
0README.md, a eulogy for GeoCities/readme myfl.uk 443
0A website's diary about you/diary myfl.uk 443
0A website that dies/dying myfl.uk 443
0The HTTP status zoo/zoo myfl.uk 443
0Edge inspector: what the web sees/inspect myfl.uk 443
0This menu, about itself/gopher myfl.uk 443
iEnd of submenu.fake (NULL) 0
7Search this hole/search myfl.uk 443
hThe page you are readingURL:https://myfl.uk/gopher myfl.uk 443
IA share card, 1200 by 630/og-index.png myfl.uk 443
iEnd of menu. Nothing follows the full stop.fake (NULL) 0

Item types: 0 text file, 1 submenu, 7 search, h HTML, I image, i information.

What this page is

A gopher menu is a list of lines. Each line is a selector record: an item type, a display string, a selector path, a host and a port, separated by tabs. The first character is the type: 0 is a text file, 1 is a directory, 7 is a search. An i is information that points nowhere, which is why the information lines above carry the dummy values fake, (NULL) and 0. That is not a fault in this page. It is the convention: an informational item is required to point at nothing, and it complies.

The types recognised by the original protocol are:

0 text file    1 submenu    2 CCSO nameserver    3 error
4 BinHex    5 DOS file    6 uuencoded    7 full-text search
8 telnet    9 binary    + mirror    g GIF    I image    T telnet 3270
h HTML and i information were added later; most servers use them whether the old clients understand them or not.

The menu above is honest about itself. The types are real. The ports say 443, because the items are served over HTTP and a gopher client sent to port 70 would get nothing. The one thing this page will not do is pretend to be the thing it is not.

The protocol

Gopher is a protocol for distributed document search and retrieval, defined in RFC 1436, published in March 1993 by six authors at the University of Minnesota. It runs over TCP and IANA assigned it port 70. A client connects, sends a selector, which is a line of text and may be empty, and the server answers with a block of text terminated by a period on a line by itself, then closes the connection. No state is retained by the server. That sentence is from the RFC, and it is the whole design: the server remembers nothing, because it does not need to.

The RFC opens with four definitions of the word gopher: a burrowing mammal of the family Geomyidae; a native or inhabitant of Minnesota, the Gopher State; one who runs errands and fetches documents for office staff; and, in the computer sense, software following a simple protocol for burrowing through a TCP/IP internet. All four are correct.

The protocol is still spoken. The curl command has understood gopher since 2010. The browser you are using does not, which is why this menu is drawn as a page.

The decision

Gopher was released at the University of Minnesota in mid-1991, and its services quickly became established. In February 1993 the university announced that it would charge licensing fees for the use of its implementation of the Gopher server. Independent implementations were not charged, but users became concerned that fees might also be charged for them, and expansion of Gopher stalled to the advantage of the World Wide Web, which was released into the public domain in April 1993. In September 2000 the university re-licensed Gopher under the GNU General Public License, by which point the decision had been made.

This page is a hole dug in the winner's territory. It uses the loser's menu.

The census

Gopher did not die, and it was never switched off. The Veronica-2 index counted 411 public gopher servers and 5,856,111 selectors on 28 January 2026, and 432 servers and 5,254,158 selectors on 29 August 2025. Servers drift down, selectors drift up, and both have been true for years. Floodgap has run a public server since 1999, and the Overbite Project keeps modern clients and browser extensions in circulation.

The protocol that lost is still running. You are reading its menu.

Honesty

This page is not a gopher server. Nothing here speaks gopher; the menu is drawn by a browser, and the search above is a function in the page, not a service listening on port 70. If you want the real thing, point a gopher client at gopher.floodgap.com on port 70 and ask for the root menu.

This page keeps no log, sets no cookie and writes nothing to your browser. Gopher never retained state, and this page inherits the condition. There is no record of your visit anywhere, because the protocol that lost is also the one that never watched you.

Sources

Facts above are taken from those sources; the numbers in the census are the index's own counts, reproduced without adjustment. A test hook is built in: ?q=quine runs the type-7 search on load.