InfoMagic Internet Tools 1995 April/Internet Tools.iso/infoserv/gopher/Macintosh-TurboGopher/old-versions/TurboGopher.1.0.7f.hqx/TurboGopher 1.0.7.rsrc/TEXT_5000_HeLp.txt

Text File | 1993-10-17 | 24.2 KB | 485 lines

======      Definitions      ======

    Gopher  n.  1. Any of various short tailed, burrowing mammals of the
    family Geomyidae, of North America.  2. (Amer. colloq.) Native or
    inhabitant of Minnesota: the Gopher State.   3.  (Amer. colloq.) One
    who runs errands, does odd-jobs, fetches or delivers documents for
    office staff.  4. (Computer tech.) software following a simple
    protocol for burrowing through a TCP/IP internet.

    Gopher+  n.  1. Hardier strains of mammals of the family
    Geomyidae.  2. (Amer. colloq.) Native or inhabitant of Minnesota,
    the Gopher state, in full winter regalia (see PARKA).  3. (Amer.
    colloq.) Executive secretary.  4. (computer tech.) Software
    following a simple protocol for burrowing through a TCP/IP
    internet, made more powerful by simple enhancements
    (see CREEPING FEATURISM).

    TurboGopher  n.  1. A small rodent with a turbocharger strapped on
    its back to increase its speed and ferocity.  2. (Amer. colloq.)
    Native or inhabitant of Minnesota after consuming three double
    espressos. 3. (Amer. colloq.) An Olympic sprinter who runs errands,
    does odd-jobs, fetches or delivers documents for office staff.  4.
    (computer tech.) Speed-optimized Macintosh software following a
    simple protocol for burrowing through a TCP/IP internet; network
    speed is achieved by using turbocharged software; incoming bits spin
    the turbine that pumps out the outgoing bits.


======      Overview      ======

TurboGopher is a Macintosh application that we believe is (still!)
the fastest Macintosh Gopher client available. Beyond optimizing
TurboGopher for raw speed while fetching documents and directories,
we turbocharged the user interface by displaying information as soon
as possible... you can read the first part of a document or directory
while the rest is being fetched. This version of TurboGopher also supports
the Gopher+ extensions to the original Internet Gopher protocol.

In spite of the design goal to run fast as possible, TurboGopher is a good
Mac citizen: it shares time with other applications. You can put
TurboGopher in the background to fetch lengthy items in the background
while you work in another application in the foreground.


======      What is Gopher?      ======

The Internet Gopher protocol and the first Gopher software was
developed by the Gopher Team at the University of Minnesota. Gopher
was originally created as a fast, simple, distributed, campus-wide
information search and retrieval system. Ease of use and implementation
has made Gopher increasingly popular on the Internet. Since its original
release, many folks on the Internet have contributed to its growth,
submitting patches, servers, clients, and linking their local servers into
the worldwide network of Gopher servers. Now there are even gateways
to seamlessly access a variety of non-Gopher services such as FTP,
Archie, WAIS, USENET news, whois servers, etc. This network of Gopher
servers is at your disposal from a Mac, PC, or workstation  connected to
the Internet. Incidentally, TurboGopher, the Internet Gopher protocol, and
the Gopher+ extensions are copyright © 1991-1993 by the University of
Minnesota.

The Gopher software may be retrieved from numerous Gopher or FTP
archive sites, including the University of Minnesota Gopher server, the
Info-Mac Archive Gopher server, and by anonymous FTP from
boombox.micro.umn.edu and sumex-aim.stanford.edu.  The most recent
release of TurboGopher is always available from the University of
Minnesota Gopher server (or by anonymous ftp from
boombox.micro.umn.edu).  If you discover a bug or just want to know if
you have the newest version, read the file called 'ReadMe-Versions-
Bugs'.  The version number of your TurboGopher may be found by
choosing 'About TurboGopher' from the Apple Menu or by clicking on
the application's icon in Finder and choosing 'Get Info' from the Finder's
File menu.


======      How does it work?      ======

Information accessible via Gopher is stored on many computers all over
the Internet. These computers are called Gopher servers. Information
stored on many kinds of non-gopher servers is also available via special
gopher servers that act as gateways (protocol translators). Virtually any
popular computer (Mac, Unix box, PC, or larger computer) can be used
as a server. Servers do not just contain files, directories and searchable
databases; they can also contain references to other servers. To retrieve
and search this information, you need to run a Gopher client application
on your computer. TurboGopher is a Gopher client application. You can
set it up to remember how to connect to one server; from here you can
effortlessly traverse the web of all interlinked servers.


======      Getting Help with TurboGopher      ======

In addition to this information you are reading right now, if you are
using System 7 (and we strongly recommend that you do, as many
TurboGopher features are only available under System 7), some Balloon
Help is available in TurboGopher.  See your Macintosh System 7
documentation for information on using Balloon Help.


======      Using TurboGopher      ======

TurboGopher uses MacTCP to communicate with gopher servers on a
network. Assuming your Mac has correctly configured MacTCP software
installed in the System Folder, TurboGopher is all set to go.


======      Navigating Gopherspace      ======

To navigate through gopherspace, double-click on any interesting items
to open (fetch) them. If you double-click on a file, TurboGopher will
fetch and display the file. Opening a folder will let you view its contents.
Double-clicking on the question-mark (Search) icons will let you search a
database. On most gopher servers these databases are full-text indexes of a
collection of information. Full-text index means that every word in every
document is considered a keyword. The best way to search a gopher full-text
database is specify the words for which to search when TurboGopher
presents you with a dialog box. The results of the search are returned as a
list of documents containing those words.

If you double-click on the phone-book icons you can search electronic
phone books. Phone book databases are structured in the sense that
they have fields (i.e. a name field, an address field, and a phone number
field). The simple phone-book lookup dialog assumes that you want to
search for someone by name.  Click on the 'More Choices' button if you
wish to specify exactly which fields to search in, when you formulate a
query. The result of the query is displayed in a document.

Disk icons represent archived Mac software or documents that you can
fetch; these items will be saved to your hard disk.  Such items are often
stored in compressed form to save space.  You need to have certain Mac
utilities to 'uncompress' such items.  The most common such utilities are
StuffIt and Compactor.  Both may be obtained from the Info-Mac archives
with gopher.  If you are running System 7 and TurboGopher retrieves an
item that needs to be 'unstuffed' or 'uncompacted', it will ask you if it
should open them via Finder and the appropriate decompress utility.  We
recommend that you use CptExpand and SitExpand for your decompress
needs; both of these are available with the TurboGopher software
distribution as Helper Applications as well as from the Info-Mac archives.

Items that are specific to MS-DOS are seen as documents with a tiny
'PC' emblazoned on them; similarly items specific to UNIX show up as
documents with a tiny 'UX' on them.  You can retrieve either of these
kinds of items if you like.  TurboGopher will ask you if you wish to save
them to your disk.  You may not 'view' these items as text.  In fact it
will probably make very little sense to fetch such items unless you intend
to further transfer them later from your Mac to another kind of computer,
or if you have some special tools on your Mac that will allow you to use
these kinds of items.

Items appearing as documents with a starburst on them are probably
graphics or picture files (typically in GIF, JPEG, or PICT format).
TurboGopher will transfer such files, save them on your disk, and
optionally launch a picture-viewing helper application if you wish
to view the picture.


======      Alternate Views      ======

Gopher+ servers may store more than one representation of a document
(an image, text, sound, video, etc. ). If more than one view of a document
is available, you can select between the views by choosing the 'Get
Alternate Views' item from the Gopher menu. When alternate views
are available, an alternate view window will be displayed with
descriptions of the views.

For many alternate views of documents, TurboGopher will save a copy of
the item to your Macintosh's disk, and then (under System 7) optionally
ask the Finder to open the item with a helper application.
You can configure which applications should be used as TurboGopher
helpers; to do this see the section on configuration options.


======      Connecting to terminal-based services      ======

Opening the 'terminal' icons will make TurboGopher launch NCSA
Telnet (or TN3270 if appropriate) and start a terminal session to a
terminal-based information system. Typically these are library catalogs or
other such services. Note that for this to work, you need to have Telnet or
TN3270 installed on your Macintosh. If you are still running System 6,
TurboGopher will only save a Telnet session file rather than launch
Telnet; this is another good reason to run System 7 on your Mac.

Following the Macintosh guidelines, TurboGopher starts out
displaying text in the standard application font.  The Font and
Size menu items let you change font appearance for documents and
lists.  TurboGopher will attempt to display phonebook lookup
results in a monospaced font (Monaco), effectively ignoring your
font selection.  It IS possible to change the font of a phonebook
results lookup window after it has been opened; however things will
not line up correctly and generally look icky.


======      Advanced Navigation Features  & Shortcuts    ======

If you double-click on a folder while holding down the Option key,
TurboGopher will re-use the current window instead of using a new one
to display the folder contents. Some folks like to do this to prevent
screen clutter and keep from having too many open windows.

You may use the up and down arrow keys on your keyboard to move up
and down lists in windows. The Enter or Return key opens an item (and is
equivalent to double-clicking on an item).  Use of the arrow keys
is not supported on the Mac Plus.... (sorry).

You may also type the first letter (or first few letters) of an item
name in a  list and TurboGopher will highlight the first item it
finds that matches (sort of like the Finder does in list views).
The Find menu item is available to locate an item in a list: just
type a string in the Find dialog.  Find can also be used to search
for text in open document windows, by the way.

To delete any item in any list window, click once on the item to
select it. Then choose 'Delete Item' from the Gopher menu.

TurboGopher remembers the last full-text index search (item with
question-mark icon) you used. If now you hold down the Option key and
double-click on a word in a document window, TurboGopher will query
that search service for all documents containing the word you selected.
You must use a search service before this pseudo-hypertext capability is
accessible (TurboGopher needs to know which search service to use in
your hypertext query).

The Recent menu lets you go back to any directory window you have
viewed during your Gopher session. The left and right arrow keys may be
used to go to previous or next windows; they are equivalent to traversing
the recent menu upwards or downwards.  Note that the Recent menu
only remembers directory windows you visit. Document or phone-book
lookup windows are not listed.

Pressing the escape key in a list window causes TurboGopher to dump
the contents and do a transaction to fetch an up-to-date listing.

If you hold down the Command Key while clicking on the title of a
window, the path you took to get there is displayed (much like the
Finder does for its windows).  Further, Command-Up arrow lets you
move back up to a directory's parent (enclosing) directory.
Command-Down arrow moves down a directory.

Also, Command-shift-Left arrow and Command-shift-Right arrow
bring to the front the windows of already visited directories and
children of one specific parent (enclosing) directory.

If you close a window by clicking in its close box while holding down the
Option key, then (like Finder) TurboGopher will close all open windows.

If you click in the close box while holding down the Shift key, then the
window will be closed and if it is a list, it will also be forgotten. In
other words, it will be removed from the Recent menu.

Of course, if you hold down both Option and Shift keys then all windows
are closed and forgotten.

For the terminally curious, if you hold down the Shift key while single
clicking on an item in a list, TurboGopher will display the item's Gopher
selector string, host name, port number and Gopher+ baggage in the
status pane.  This is a quick peek.  If you want to copy-paste this
information, use the Get Attribute Info menu item found under the Gopher
menu; the information you want is in the +INFO attribute (the first line).

If wish to fetch an item that is a Macintosh file (binhexed file,
shows up with the icon of a disk), but don't want TurboGopher to
automatically dehex it as it fetches, you may force TurboGopher to
fetch the document as a raw, unprocessed file.   To do this, hold
down the Control key while you double-click on the item.   For
folks using DownLine or other applications for de-binhexing and
de-archival, this is one way to do what you want.


======      Authenticated Servers      ======

TurboGopher now supports AdmitOne Authentication for Gopher+ servers
that restrict access to information on a per-user basis.  When you
attempt to open a directory that has such access restrictions,
TurboGopher will prompt you for your username and password on the
restricted-access server.  TurboGopher and the server negotiate to
establish a valid ticket, and subsequent requests to the server use
a new ticket for each request. This means that your password is
not sent over the network, and that you only have to enter your
password to get the initial authorization.


======      Bookmarks and Bookmark Files      ======

If you formulate a search or find a folder you would like to come back to
quickly later, you can use the Set Bookmark menu item to save your
place.  Set Bookmark saves a reference to a folder, file, search, terminal
session... in fact any Gopher item.  If nothing is selected in the front
list window, a bookmark is made for a folder representing the window. Try
it, it's easier to do than to say.

Bookmarks are placed in a special Bookmarks window. Use the Show
Bookmarks menu item to open the Bookmarks window. Bookmarks are
remembered even after you quit TurboGopher; contents of the Recent
menu are however forgotten. It might be useful to consider the
Bookmarks window to be a special kind  of 'worksheet' or 'construction
area' for you to build your own scratch-pad of useful gopher resources.

You may edit the names or other parts of bookmarks using the Edit
Bookmark… menu item.  Unless you understand the Gopher protocol we
don't recommend that you change anything except perhaps the title (name)
of a Bookmark.

You can save your Bookmarks window or ANY list window or ANY
selected item as a Bookmark file ('Save as Bookmark File…' menu
item).  Bookmark files are small and may be exchanged with other
Gopher users if you wish.   If you know what you are doing, Bookmark
files may be edited with permissive text editors.

The 'Import Bookmarks…' menu item lets you read a Bookmark file
right into your Bookmarks window. The 'Open Gopher Bookmark File…'
menu item on the other hand, places the contents of a bookmark file
in a window of its own. The latter is equivalent to double-clicking
on bookmark files from the Finder. If you launch TurboGopher by
double-clicking on a bookmark file, it will not immediately connect
to the Home Gopher server, but will open the Bookmark file instead.
So you may use bookmark files as custom Home Gopher servers.


======      Item Attributes      ======

More sophisticated Gopher servers (referred to as Gopher+ servers)
can provide you with information about any selected item, much like
the Finder's Get Info menu lets you get information about a Mac item.

Use the 'Get Attribute Info' menu item of the Gopher menu for this.


======      Canceling Slow Network Operations      ======

TurboGopher executes most requests in a few seconds. A document or
directory is displayed as it is received. However, if a server is
especially slow or busy or if you have started to fetch what appears
to be a very long and uninteresting document or directory, you may
cancel the fetching process by closing the document or directory
window. Once you have closed the window, TurboGopher assumes that it
does not need to fetch the remainder of the item. Note that when you
fetch a file that is saved to your Mac disk, TurboGopher displays a
window with the status of the transaction. Again, to cancel, you can
simply close the window.

A more extreme method for canceling a network operation is to choose
the Cancel All Requests item from the Gopher menu (or by holding
down the command key and typing a period). If you open a file or folder
by double-clicking while holding down the Option key (to conserve
screen space as described earlier), TurboGopher will also cancel the
running network transaction if one is outstanding; and this is in fact
exactly what you want over low speed connections such as SLIP. Both
these features make TurboGopher seem faster and more responsive
over SLIP links.

TurboGopher runs happily in the background (if you wish to fetch
something very large or from a very slow server). You may also fetch an
item (file or directory) while another one is still being fetched, since
TurboGopher supports multiple concurrent streams.  Command-Period
cancels all active streams.


======      Starting and  Configuring TurboGopher      ======

The 'Start Gopher' item under the File menu opens a window containing
the initial directory fetched by connecting to your home Gopher server.
TurboGopher is pre-configured to connect on startup to one of the
University of Minnesota's Gopher servers. You may change your home
Gopher server by using the 'Configure' item under the Setup menu. To
do this you need the full Internet domain name and port of the desired
primary server. You can configure TurboGopher to use one of two
alternate primary servers. This distributes the load for a campus over two
different (but equivalent) primary servers and it prevents a single
point of failure. TurboGopher will randomly try one of the two and
then try the other if the first is down.  If you don't understand
this, you don't have to bother with it or with the Another Gopher item
under the File menu.

TurboGopher attempts to speak Gopher+ to all Home Gopher servers,
and then backs off if it sees that the server does not have Gopher+
style items. This is a bit presumptuous, and it confuses some
servers. These servers should be revised in the future so they
don't confuse so easily. If configured to connect to a Home Gopher
server and nothing is displayed, you  may want to try using the
'Another Gopher' item under the file menu and  making sure that the
Gopher+ check box is NOT checked.


======      TurboGopher Options    ======

You can use the Options item under the Setup menu to customize some
behaviors of TurboGopher. The Single Directory Window checkbox
makes TurboGopher recycle its windows whenever you open a new
directory (and not just when you hold down the Option key).

Use the ISO Latin-1 checkbox if you need to use Latin/Romance
language characters. Many sites in Europe have a need for this to
display their national characters. If you visit European gopher servers
and the accented characters don't display correctly, you may want to
choose this option.

The Extended Directory listings checkbox is disabled; it's for a future feature.

If you visit Gopher servers with Japanese or Chinese documents, and
you use a Japanese or Chinese font while running System 7.1's
WorldScript, Gopher will display Japanese SJIS (MS Kanji) or traditional
Chinese characters (BIG-5).

When you save documents, TurboGopher normally saves them as
MacWrite II TEXT documents (we like MacWrite II).  If you'd rather
save them as TEXT documents of your favorite word processor or
editor, use the appropriate 'Set…' button in the Options dialog
to select the word processor of your choice.

With Gopher+ servers, items may be available in a number of alternate
views.  When fetched, these alternate views are typically saved as a
file to be viewed by a Mac application.  If you are a network/macintosh
cowboy, you can change the Mac application and Mac filetype
associated with a Gopher+ alternate view.... this changes the helper
application that TurboGopher asks the finder to launch to view the
document.  Double-click the view in the list and you will be presented
with a dialog in which you can select the application to be used as a
TurboGopher helper.

By the way, you won't be able to do this if you're running System 6...


======      Miscellaneous      ======

TurboGopher saves or caches the item lists for all visited directories
(even when windows are closed).  Since these lists don't ever have to be
fetched from the server again, this dramatically increases speed when
choosing any item from the Recent menu.  If TurboGopher runs out of
memory it will release the caches for closed windows.  Closing unneeded
windows will reduce TurboGopher's memory needs.   If you browse
many large directories and documents, we recommend that you increase
TurboGopher's memory allocation.  Do this by clicking once on the
TurboGopher icon in Finder and then doing a Get Info in Finder.  Set
the memory allocation up in the ensuing dialog box.

TurboGopher stores what it needs in a file called TurboGopher Settings;
this lives in the Preferences folder, which is found in your System Folder.
If you drag this file out from the Preferences folder and place it in the
same folder as TurboGopher, it will still be found and used.


======      For Experts      ======

If you are a campus or department network administrator, and you would
like information about pre-configuring internal defaults, read the short
Inside TurboGopher document.  This is available in the Gopher software
distribution from the University of Minnesota's Gopher server, along with
with the current version of TurboGopher itself.  You may send e-mail to
the Gopher Team at:

             [e-mail]

Please write to the development team (at the above address) with bugs,
suggestions, or (of course!) praise. To be informed by e-mail of new
developments in the Gopher world, or of new versions of Gopher
software, you may subscribe to 'gopher-news'; Send your request to:

       [e-mail].

Have fun surfing the Internet...

- The internet Gopher Team at the University of Minnesota
April 20, 1993.


-------------------------------------------------
...and now, to keep the lawyers happy...

The Gopher software and documentation is copyright © 1991 - 1993
by the University of Minnesota.

Permission to use, copy, modify, and distribute this software and
documentation for non-commercial purposes and without fee is hereby
granted, provided that the University of Minnesota copyright notices and
this permission notice appear in all copies, and that the name
University of Minnesota not be used in advertising or publicity
pertaining to this software and documentation without specific, written
prior permission. The University of Minnesota makes no representations
about the suitability of this software and documentation for any
purpose.  It is provided 'as is' without express or implied warranty.

Commercial use of Gopher requires specific permission from the
University of Minnesota; contact the internet gopher development team at
[e-mail] for further information.
-------------------------------------------------