gopher access from modern systems was Re: Coherent 3.1.0...

Besides quite a bit of file archives, which I think would be useful particularly to this group (I maintain personally a big collection of classic Mac software; Jacob has his Amiga and Coherent archives, and lots of other stuff), I use my own gopher server for fast access to news and weather articles that the server collects. No ads, simple text. Gopher is not very good at hypertext, but it is a lot better at collecting documents into coherent hierarchies. While FTP can do this too, it has more overhead and (if improperly configured) security impact, and HTTP doesn't do this natively (such things exist as machinations of the server) besides all the excess with HTTP's overhead. Sure, you could simulate such simplicity with a constrained HTTP implementation, but why bother when Gopher is already a very simple protocol and works well? Gopher is also very compelling on mobile devices, especially bandwidth and screen constrained, which is why I wrote a client for Android. There is also a J2ME client that runs on any phone that can run MIDlets. Plus, damn near anything can parse a gopher menu. It's almost as trivial a format as you get. Gopher's main deficiency is discoverability -- it's hard to navigate back from a terminal document into a menu without a lot of gyration. I'm trying to solve this on the client side without disturbing what is a refreshingly simple way to access a server.