[gopher] gopherVR

[Maurice McCarthy <maurice.mccarthy@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi all and Michael Casadevall especially,

With a little effort managed to contact Mark McCahill, one of the originators 
of gopher and 

the principal writer of gopherVR. He has posted "what looks like the source 
code" on line for us as said below.

Regards
Maurice


On Jun 24, 2008, at 8:55 AM, McCarthy, Maurice [Contractor] wrote:

> Hi,
>
> Pardon the intrusion but we were hoping you might be able to help.
>
> A small collection of people still advocate gopher. They are on John  
> Goerzen's mailing list gopher@xxxxxxxxxxxx   

http://www.complete.org/mailinglists/archives/
>

wow! I had no idea...

> A chap called Michael Casadevall on the list is interested in 
> gopherVR.
>

I do have what appears to be source for GopherVR, and compiled  
versions which would probably run on a Mac if you could find an old  
enough machine - this stuff is from back in the 68020 transition to  
PPC 601 CPU era. I just put the source tar file in this directory: 

http://croquet-src-01.oit.duke.edu/gophervr/

Have fun!

It would be amusing to see a port to linux, although there are some  
things I would do totally differently today.

First, there was no generally available OpenGL for the Mac and Solaris  
machines we were running GopherVR on, so we took the VOGL library and  
used that. Since there was no hardware support for depth culling (and  
no prospect of a hardware z buffer) I got to glue in a binary space  
partition (BSP) hidden surface removal algorithm. If I were doing this  
today, I'd assume OpenGL and a GPU.

If I were doing this today, I'd probably take OpenCroquet and use that  
as the basis to write the Gopher client stuff. Since Croquet comes  
with an open source VM that runs on Mac, Linux, and Windows, supports  
OpenGL and all sorts of other nice things you'd get a cross platform  
GopherVR. You'd also get to program in Smalltalk, which I would  
consider a huge plus, but Croquet is my "fun" project these days, so I  
am a bit biased. current state of the are in the open source croquet  
world is here: http://croquet-src-01.oit.duke.edu/cobalt.html

Anyway - let me know how things work out.


> On 22 June 2008 Michael wrote on the list:
>
>         "To my knowledge, the code for GopherVR was lost a long time  
> ago. If
>         someone has it, I'd gladly port and package it for Ubuntu/ 
> Debian."
>         Michael Casadevall <sonicmctails AT aol.com>
>
> Thanks in advance
> Maurice McCarthy
>
>
> PS
> Firefox 3 abandons gopher support but Cameron Kaiser has just  
> published
>
> https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/7685
>
>  which is a new gopher client for Firefox 3 in the "experimental"  
> add-ons.
>
> It is written in JavaScript and there are MacIntosh Camino, Windows  
> Firefox, Adobe Air and Linux versions at
> Cameron's site gopher://gopher.floodgap.com or http://www.floodgap.com
>


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