Welcome to V'Ger!
____ ____ _ ______
|_ _| |_ _|| | .' ___ |
\ \ / / \_|/ .' \_| .---. _ .--.
\ \ / / | | ____ / /__\\[ `/'`\]
\ ' / \ `.___] || \__., | |
\_/ `._____.' '.__.'[___]
.Cloud
port 22, 23, 70, 80, 443, 1965
"Roger, liftoff, and the clock is started!"
- Alan Shepard
A Free, public, online community service providing the Project Gemini
experimental protocol service.
V'Ger's Gemini server was born 24 August 2019 - Exactly 1940 years
following the complete and utter destruction of Pompeii (79 AD), exactly
1609 years after the fall of Rome when King Alaric of the Visigoths
breeched her walls and sacked the city (410 AD), and exactly 58 years
after the birth of V'Ger's founder!
V'Ger provides several different free public services, many which are
built upon FOSS, some of which are listed below. For more information on
Project Gemini itself, just read futher on down.
We're very happy that you've arrived, and on behalf of all the "ugly
bags of mostly water" that run this place, thank you for choosing V'Ger!
=> https://Vger.Cloud The "Home Page" of V'Ger (Web)
Everyone needs a home, and this is the home of V'Ger on the web, with
links to Other Free services provided by Vger. Its presence on the World
Wide Web casts perhaps the widest possible net in terms of accessibility
for the public.
=> https://Pleroma.Cloud The Pleroma Public Cloud (Fediverse)
Pleroma is a federated social networking infrastructure akin to Mastodon
and other monolithic 'silos' like Facebook and Twitter. The "V'Ger
Powered" Pleroma instance enables access to a huge social network of
over 3 million people in a space commonly referred to as the,
"Fediverse". The Pleroma Public Cloud shares this space with many other,
as well as different, types of services.
Unlike so-called microblogging services like Twitter, V'Ger's Pleroma
service offers the ability to make posts to the Fediverse of up to 6660
characters in size, along with support for plain text (like Mastodon),
Markdown, and even HTML.
=> https://Sulu.Vger.Cloud V'Ger Public Mastodon (Sulu.Vger.Cloud)
There are literally thousands of servers (called instances) in the
Fediverse, and Mastodon servers comprise the bulk of instances. Unlike
most other Mastodon instances, the Vger Mastodon Server permits up to
4440 character posts (called toots in mastodonian), and also supports
the option of prooving your identity through Keybase.io - another free
public service.
Other types of federating servers include Pixelfed (similar to
Instagram), PeerTube (think YouTube or Vimeo), that leverages bittorrent
for streaming, Friendica, Diaspora, and many more. Together, the users
of these different types of services can share media and communicate
with each other through 100% FOSS based infrastructure - no advertising,
no tracking!
Pretty kewl, huh?
=> telnet://Vger.Cloud The NOMAD Internetwork BBS (telnet)
Long before 'the Well', Compuserve, Prodigy, and AOL, there was the
original Social Network - The BBS. In the days when the Internet was
still the ARPAnet and private home based computers were 8 bit machines,
the only way to engage online in computer networks was over a 300bps
(yes, bits per second, or BAUD) telephone connection. Because anything
further away than six miles incurred long distance charges, Fidonet was
born, and the BBS was the portal everyone signed on to so they could
exchange files and messages, play online multi-user games and enjoy the
bleeding edge in consumer based technology.
Each day, every BBS participating in Fidonet and other Echolink networks
would close for an hour to call the nearest BBS to them and transfer
messages in a leapfrog style method, across the entire world. Today, we
call these mesh networks - like the promised 5G.
NorthTech Computer, being one of the very first consumer based ISPs in
Los Angeles, first deployed the NOMAD Internetwork in the early 1990's
as a UNIX shell access service and extension of its BBS Hosting services
when the top speeds over regular telephone lines were 1200 BAUD.
Today, after severe atrophy of the entire BBS industry following the
rising popularity of the HTTP protocol, HTML, and the advent of the
World Wide Web, the BBS community is once again gaining critical mass in
terms of users and machines. Fidonet managed to survive the lean years,
but Echomail messages no longer have to wait for that one hour window to
send and receive messages.
During the first gulf war, the allied armies provided BBS centers in
tents so that soldiers could communicate back and forth with their loved
ones over Fidonet. Nowadays, only the most serious hobbiests and hackers
labor to maintain actual dialup telephone access to their BBS systems,
and telnet is the defacto standard in accessing BBSes, with SSH being
supported as well.
Vger is proud to bring the NOMAD Internetwork out of mothball status,
making it available to anyone who would like to venture out into that
world, but today, there are many distributed BBS communication networks,
including Dove-Net, FsxNet, WWIVnet, and others, along with a vibrant
community of users.
=> gopher://Vger.Cloud Vger Gopher Service
Gopher protocol was the original hypertext based system available both
via dialup/telnet access front ends and gained prominence on the NSFnet,
the immediate predecessor of the Internet, and eventually the Internet
itself!
Virtually every library that had online catalogs made them available via
Gopher, universities used it for text browsing and file retrieval
services similar to ftp, and support for the gopher protocol was
integrated into all browsers natively. Due to restrictive licensing
issues, botched attempts at extending capabilities of the protocol
without consensus on standardization, and notwithstanding the fact that
it is a technology fully two decades younger than BBSes, it fell harder
and further from grace than the BBS world ever did, its deathknell
almost being sounded after being supplanted by HTTP protocol.
The first online phone books were launched in gopherspace, but for many
years there were far fewer Gopher services than there were BBSes. Today,
it's still debatable whether there are more Gopher servers than BBSes on
the Internet, but what can certainly be said is that it indeed holds
much more relevance in online computing than does the BBS, and is once
again proliferating - even CCSO services and protocol, which actually
never completely disappeared and is the functional predecessor of LDAP,
has been revived by a member developer of Project Gemini.
Gopher protocol continues to rise in poularity, utility, and relevance,
with practical applications and new deployments almost daily, a viable
alternative to HTTP based communication systems in many use cases. And
yet, its intentional limitations have led to an initiative do deliver a
new promising experimental technology somewhere in between Gopher and
the Web called Gemini protocol...
More information on Project Gemini
Vger has returned home to earth from the interstellar realms beyond the
terminal shock, and incidentally, the CBS television series, "Star Trek"
saw its debut in the middle of the original Project Gemini program under
the tutelage of NASA, and championed by Dwight D. Eisenhower and John F.
Kennedy.
We found that to be a poignant bit of trivial significance ;)
------------------------------------------------------------------------