Take the Gopher hole

Once you are logged in, there is a small collection of companion information about the exhibition and each of its machines. The most fitting way to read it is Gopher. Every exhibition machine has a Gopher client installed, but it is not on the command search path everywhere. Use the command for the system you are logged in to and point the client at reno.

First, find the Gopher

4.3BSD-Reno
% /usr/local/bin/gopher -p / reno
Ultrix 4.5
% /usr/local/bin/gopher -p / reno
SunOS 5.6
% /opt/gopher/bin/gopher -p / reno
NetBSD 1.0
% /usr/local/bin/gopher -p / reno

In any of these commands, you can use the fully qualified hostname reno.exhib.unix instead of the short name reno.

This opens the top-level menu. Enter the Exhibition directory to find the companion information, then pick an entry to read about the exhibition or one of its machines. The exact keys vary a little between the clients installed on these old systems, but the menu and the client's on-screen help will get you around.

Gopher client showing the Exhibition and RFCs directories on the reno server
The top-level Gopher menu, as seen from Ultrix 4.5.

What is Gopher?

Gopher is an internet information system introduced in 1991, just as the World Wide Web was getting started. Instead of web pages full of links, scripts, and layout, a Gopher server presents a tree of menus. An item may lead to another menu, open a text document, or retrieve a file. There is not much machinery between you and the information.

That makes Gopher a good match for a text terminal and for the Unixes in this exhibition. A Gopher address can include a server, a port, an item type, and a selector identifying the item to request. Port 70 is the usual default. The commands above ask the server on reno for the root selector, /.

Gopher did not vanish when the Web took over, but modern web browsers generally do not speak the protocol. You need a Gopher client to visit a gopher:// address directly.

Some light reading from the IETF

There is also an RFCs directory at the top level. It contains a handful of original Requests for Comments covering protocols you can meet in this exhibition. Reading them in a Gopher client on a period Unix is, admittedly, doing standards documentation the hard way. It is also the right way for this place.

rfc791.txt
Internet Protocol
rfc793.txt
Transmission Control Protocol
rfc821.txt
Simple Mail Transfer Protocol
rfc854.txt
Telnet Protocol Specification
rfc959.txt
File Transfer Protocol
rfc1288.txt
The Finger User Information Protocol
rfc1436.txt
The Internet Gopher Protocol
RFC 1436, The Internet Gopher Protocol, displayed in a Gopher client
Reading the Gopher protocol's own RFC through Gopher.

Prefer HTTP?

The companion information is published as HTML as well. From any exhibition machine, open it with the text-mode browser lynx: 

% lynx http://sunos5/

You can use the fully qualified hostname if you prefer:

% lynx http://sunos5.exhib.unix/

Both versions contain the same companion material. HTTP is the familiar route; Gopher is the route that feels at home here.