In HappyMacs Software Archive is Open!, this blog introduced you to the HappyMacs Gopher site. This site is largely a vintage Mac software repository, with all titles available for download via the Gopher protocol. Gopher, as you may recall, was a predecessor to the web, providing a plain text clickable link environment that can be thought of as not being all that different from HTTP, but without inline images, video and sound.
The HappyMacs Gopher site opened in 2015, and has provided largely uninterrupted service from then until September of 2020. It has been down more than up since then, and has just come fully back on line in January of 2021. This post is to highlight that happy fact – we are back!

So what happened in September of 2020? Well, at that time I upgraded the cable internet at the house to 1Gbps service, which required my service provider to replace the existing cable modem with their latest model. This new modem certainly did what they said it would. It delivers blisteringly fast 1Gbps service, but in delivering that it completely and fundamentally broke the HappyMacs Gopher site.
The new modem seems to have a protocol-aware NAT function, and Gopher is a protocol far too long in the tooth (a very little gopher joke there!) for the manufacturer of the modem to have bothered with support for in their latest product. Without NAT functionality, everything stops working of course. If you don’t know what NAT is, don’t worry. All you really need to understand is that it is a fundamental underpinning of how home internet access works these days, and without it things grind to a halt really fast.
It took me a week or so of tests to come to the conclusion that it was NAT that was the problem, but I finally isolated the issue and proved it. Nonetheless, my service provider’s technical support was of no help. “Gopher” was not a word they understood to be anything other than a large toothed rodent (!) and at any rate, there was no fix available. The modem did what it did and that was that. Pretty much no-one cared if an obscure and long dead protocol like Gopher no longer worked across this new modem.
Well, no-one but me, that is. I did care, and I spent the two months or so, in fits and starts as work allowed, reworking the entire site to get around the lack of NAT. I won’t go into the details, but I am guessing that NAT must have been “hit and miss” in the days when Gopher was first designed. At least the Gopher server I am using could be configured to force the NAT issue in the design of the site itself. The solution was painful, requiring a Gopher configuration file for each archive file being served, and with over 400 files on offer at the Happy Macs vintage software archive, this was no small task.
So, instead of manually hand-cranking over 400 Gopher configuration files, I settled in and wrote a program to automate the generation of these files in a completely recursive manner. Point the program at the top of the software archive, and it would descend the site hierarchy and generate all necessary configuration files for all files on offer. I got the program finished and running over the Christmas break and had the site back “on the air” by the end of the year. It has taken me this long to get a post written about it, but here it is at last.
Accessing the HappyMacs Gopher Site
So, with the site back on the air, and if you are learning about it for the first time as you read this post, you may be wondering how you access something that is built around this ancient Gopher protocol. Regrettably, modern Gopher clients are completely non-existent, and most web browsers no longer support Gopher either. So, on first examination, it would appear that the HappyMacs software repository, available via Gopher, is not really available at all – there no clients, no browsers and so, no way to access it… right?
(Happily) Wrong! If you are interested in a vintage Mac software repository, it follows that you either have a vintage Mac to run the software on, or a modern computer running a vintage Mac emulator. Either way, you have the ability to run vintage Mac software, and there were plenty of Gopher clients available in the heyday of MacOS. All you need to do is load one on your vintage Mac environment and you are “good to go”. Once you have it up and running, you can access the HappyMacs vintage Mac software repository to your hearts’ content.
So where do you get a Gopher client for your vintage Mac, so that you can access the HappyMacs vintage software repository? Well, from the HappyMacs vintage software repository of course! Now I know that this sounds like a MacOS “Catch 22” – you can get a Gopher client from the HappyMacs software repository, but you have to already have one in order to even access that repository. This sounds like a non starter, except that it is not.
Thanks to the good people at Floodgap Systems, you can access the HappyMacs software repository via their web browser based Gopher proxy just long enough to download a Gopher client from there and install it on your vintage Mac. After that you can use that Gopher client for all further accesses to the repository.
The Floodgap Gopher proxy is available at https://gopher.floodgap.com/gopher/gw, and it looks like this once the page has loaded:

To access the HappyMacs Gopher site, enter “happymacs.ddns.net” into the gopher address line per the below screenshot, and click the “Go” button to the right of the address entry box. It all looks like the screen shot below:

When you do that, you will arrive at the Happy Macs Gopher site, and that will look like this:

Here at HappyMacs, we recommend using the TurboGopher Gopher client. As the name suggests, it is fast, even on a 68K Mac. Note that you may find some of its operations not intuitive, since they do not always follow the behavioral norms that web browsers have taught us since TurboGopher was in its prime. The in-program help is good however, and if you get stuck on something, just use it to read up on how to accomplish your desired task. I have to do this every time I want to set the TurboGopher equivalent of a bookmark.
To get TurboGopher, click on the “Vintage Mac Software Archive” entry on the HappyMacs Gopher site.
For 68K
- Select “1 – 68K (Up to MacOS 8.1)”
- Scroll down to “TurboGopher 2.0.3 (FAT)”
- Click “TurboGopher 2.0.3 (FAT)” to download
For PPC
- Select “2 – PPC (Up to MacOS 8.6)”
- Scroll down to “TurboGopher 2.0.3 (FAT)”
- Click “TurboGopher 2.0.3 (FAT)” to download
- Despite the title, this version of TurboGopher runs perfectly under MacOS 9.x
By the way, if you are enlightened enough to still be using System 6, there is an earlier version of TurboGopher available that runs nicely under System 6. Just drop a comment on this post and I will add it to the site so that you can download it. It will be part of the System 6 area on the site when I get that built out, so it is not there yet, but I can add this one file if you need it.
Just a warning that downloads are quite slow through the Floodgap proxy (at least in my use of it), but you will find them much faster once you are accessing the site directly via TurboGopher. Be patient, the proxy download will ultimately complete.
Expand and install TurboGopher and then start the application. Point it at happymacs.ddns.net and enjoy Gopher and the HappyMacs vintage Mac software repository in all its intended glory.