GOPHERS - General purpose Gopher server for Windows NT platforms 

GOPHERS (pronounced Gopher-S) is one of a trio of freeware servers 
released by the European Microsoft Windows NT Academic Center (EMWAC). 
The server is a fairly basic implementation that does little more than 
serve its purpose (no pun intended), which is allowing Windows NT 
(Intel, Alpha, and MIPS) machines to serve information using the gopher 
protocol. Like its siblings WAISS (a WAIS server) and HTTPS (a Web 
server), GOPHERS is unsupported software that has ceased being 
developed (i.e. v0.91 is the final release of the server). 

Even though the server never made it to a v1.0 release as was expected 
when originally developed back in 1994, GOPHERS carries a decent set of 
features, including the ability to run as a Windows NT system service, 
multithreading support for multiple simultaneous connections, WAIS 
database searching capabilities (requires EMWAC's freeware WAIS 
toolkit), transaction logging, error logging using the Windows NT Event 
Logger, and a Control Panel application for configuration and 
administration tasks. Overall, like the protocol itself, GOPHERS has 
largely gone by the wayside. But for enterprises looking to complete 
their array of Internet services with a protocol that can efficiently 
serve extremely large collections of text-based information, GOPHERS 
remains a viable option. 

Pros: Adequate set of features; Win NT Intel, Alpha, and MIPS versions 
available; freeware 

Cons: Unsupported and no longer developed, basic implementation of the 
Gopher protocol 

New: No new features - the server ceased being developed in 1994; 


Version Reviewed: 0.91 
Date of Review: 3/1/98 
Reviewed by: Forrest Stroud