How Solderpunk and Sean Conner Started Gemini Protocol (and, Collectively, Geminispace) Back in 2019
Of course it came "out of Gopher"
Our Daily Bulletins are turning 5 this month (end of October). Without these, and without COVID-19 giving the extra time needed to work on the task, we'd probably not explore IPFS and Gemini Protocol, which actually started a year earlier.
Based on the "official" history as told by the founder/s, this is how the "second in command" (and co-maintainer of the specs) Sean Conner fits into the story:
Things suddenly get real
Just two days after the creation of the side-phlog, Solderpunk was very surprised (though happily so!) on the morning of June 22nd, 2019, to find an email from fellow phlogger Sean Conner announcing that he had actually implemented Gemini as it was then specified. Sean had written a server in Lua, named GLV-1.12556 (after NASA's designation for the Titan rocket, or Gemini Launch Vehicle (GLV) which launched Gemini 1), which powered the server.
In order to actually access the new server, Solderpunk hastily converted his VF-1 Gopher client (named after the VF-1 Valkyrie from the Macross anime, in recognition of the role that the public access unix system SDF, which also takes its namesake from Macross, had played in keeping Gopherspace alive into the 21st century) into a Gemini client, named AV-98 (named after the AV-98 Ingram from the Patlabor anime). It didn't take long and on the same day the first successful Gemini protocol requests and responses between two separate parties took place.
Here's the raw thing:
Gemini in the wild, AV-98
(originally posted in Gopherspace on 2019-06-22)
To my great shock - but, I'll admit, my delight, too - I woke up this morning to an email informing me that the world's first Gemini server was online! Sean over at conman.org has setup gemini://gemini.conman.org using a server he wrote in Lua (you can get the code from there).
In order to decently test things out, I have done a hasty conversion of VF-1 from gopher to Gemini, resulting in a new client with exactly the same user interface, which I've dubbed AV-98. You can get it at:
Link to the tildegit.org AV-98 repo
I suppose this is actually a thing, now!
It still is. In more ways than they envisioned back then. █