BoneQuest

gopher.bonequest.com

BoneQuest by way of port 70

Try it

Point a gopher client at the server. Today's strip is on the front page, with the image, the dialog, and links to the previous strip and a random one:

gopher://gopher.bonequest.com/

Lagrange speaks gopher and shows the strip inline. No gopher client? curl still speaks it:

$ curl gopher://gopher.bonequest.com/

Every strip lives at the same path as on the web, so gopher://gopher.bonequest.com/1/9000 is bonequest.com/9000.

What is gopher?

gopher is a protocol for browsing documents through nested menus. A client connects, sends a one-line selector, and gets back either a menu of items (other menus, text files, images, search boxes) or the item itself. There are no pages, styles, or scripts, just lists of things to pick from.

A short history

gopher was written at the University of Minnesota in 1991 by a team led by Mark McCahill, and named after the university's mascot. It was formalized in RFC 1436 (1993) and runs on TCP port 70.

For a few years it was a serious rival to the World Wide Web. Then, in 1993, the university announced licensing fees for its server, the same year CERN put the web in the public domain, and the web won. A small community still runs gopher holes today.

References

Also on this server