The Personal Gopher provides an environment facilitating the intuitive reshaping of heterogeneous information offerings originating both upon the Internet and on local storage resources. Its design was shaped by the desire that the end-user might need no knowledge of the underlying source or nature of information resources, and that this environment would preserve the simplicity of operation so well advanced by the original Gopher application.
The Personal Gopher (henceforward referred to as PGopher) grew out of a conventional Gopher service constructed by the author, a service borne from the frustration that existing services of the day were conspicuously lacking in any richness of interlinkages not narrowly specific to the provincial interests of the host institution. St. Olaf maintained a listing of international travel advisories, Michigan State maintained an excellent selection of library linkages, University of Wisconsin-Parkside maintained an excellent musical data collection, and a whole world of FTP-sourced information lay latently present surrounding the Gopher datasphere. Despite these resources, non-UMN Gophers revolved as satellites bound to the UMN Gopher service only, in near-complete disregard to the richness of information surrounding them, leaving access to distributed information resources little further advanced from menu-driven FTP data browsers.
Out of these frustrations, the University of South Carolina Department
of Mathematics Gopher (USC-Math) service was born in May 1992, partly
to serve as a distribution point for mathematical papers and other
data specific to the department, and partly as an effort by the author
to bring together some of the general-interest data resources to be
found in the Gopherspace of the day.
However, the further the service advanced, the less satisfactory it
became to the author in several respects. First of all, the service
increasingly began to reflect the particular interests of the author,
rather than the representative interests of the potential user community. As
the USC service was developed primarily upon personal time, this did
not seem a trend likely to diminish. Additionally, it was apparent that
only a very select few users would have the machine access, the Unix
and conventional gopherd
know-how, and the personal inclination to develop similar personal
information collections using the existing gopherd mechanisms.
This seemed most unfortunate, as the introduction of the bookmark
facilities first implemented in the XGopher client convincingly
demonstrated that total reliance upon remote Gopher services for the
organization of data was not strictly mandated by the specifications
of the Gopher protocol.
A final motivating circumstance precipitated the development of the Personal Gopher application. In a demonstration of the USC-Math conventional Gopher service to an interested observer, the individual suggested system ease-of-use might be informally explored by asking a child unfamiliar with both Unix and the Gopher application to seek out a specified information resource. Navigation of the system using the cursor keys was briefly demonstrated, and the nine-year-old was left to work on the system with the thought the activity would prove engaging for an extended period of time.
To our surprise, the child sought us out fewer than five minutes later to ask how the information specified - the recipe for Garlic Scampi - might be sent to the printer. During these five minutes, the child had navigated through gigabytes of information and crossed three computer systems physically spanning half of the United States without any awareness networked resources were being referenced in the first place. In the light of this unexpected success on a menu system oriented towards graduate-level mathematics professors, not elementary-school students, it was conjectured that such an interface might not only be accessible to a wide range of audiences, but also that an interface could be fashioned to allow the user to bring together data items and collections of interest by capitalizing upon the preliminary bookmark support in the Gopher program. Thus the idea for the Personal Gopher was born.