Surfing the Gopherspace

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2022-05-12 15:30:03

A recent Daring Fireball post about the (super cool) Playdate handheld gaming system mentioned Gopher, which I'd never heard of before! Here's the referenced tweet:

When Playdate shipped, Panic co-founder Steven wrote a little about what it meant to him. And in the spirit of doing things differently, posted it to a Gopher (!) site. If you're up for it, find it here: gopher://stevenf.com:70/0/journal/2022/04/18/first-playdates-shipping.txt

You should see the full text of the Playdate post as a response. Intriguing, right? Where's the https:// part of the url? What's this gopher thing all about?

You've probably heard of protocols before. Maybe you're even an expert in human-cyborg relations. Hopefully, this explainer sits well with all parties:

That's my own homespun definition - so I'll happily accept edits or suggestions (an RFC, if you will). A potentially helpful analogy for protocols that I've seen is a Japanese tea ceremony - a bunch of formal procedures to govern a specific shared experience.

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