The Gopher protocol (/ˈɡoʊfər/ ⓘ) is a communication protocol designed for distributing, searching, and retrieving documents in Internet Protocol networks. The design of the Gopher protocol and user interface is menu-driven, and presented an alternative to the World Wide Web in its early stages, but ultimately fell into disfavor, yielding to Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). The Gopher ecosystem is often regarded as the effective predecessor of the World Wide Web.[1]
gopher.floodgap.com is one of the last running Gopher servers, was the one that I usually used as a starting point when firing up a gopher client. It has a Web gateway up:
Gopher is a well-known information access protocol that predates the World Wide Web, developed at the University of Minnesota during the early 1990s. What is Gopher? (Gopher-hosted, via the Public Proxy)
This proxy is for Gopher resources only – using it to access websites won’t work and is logged!
This has been mangled up by history. The important parts of the World Wide Web are having hypertext (basically links inside the document to other documents) and being networked (those links can take you to a completely different server). Apple’s Hypercard had hypertext, but it wasn’t networked. Usenet was networked, but had no hypertext.
This is laid out in Tim Berners-Lee’s original 1989 proposal for the web while he was at CERN:
Gopher has all the qualities he was talking about. Gopher was a different kind of World Wide Web. We decided against that particular route, and for mostly good reasons, IMO.
Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_(protocol)
gopher.floodgap.com is one of the last running Gopher servers, was the one that I usually used as a starting point when firing up a gopher client. It has a Web gateway up:
https://gopher.floodgap.com/gopher/
This has been mangled up by history. The important parts of the World Wide Web are having hypertext (basically links inside the document to other documents) and being networked (those links can take you to a completely different server). Apple’s Hypercard had hypertext, but it wasn’t networked. Usenet was networked, but had no hypertext.
This is laid out in Tim Berners-Lee’s original 1989 proposal for the web while he was at CERN:
https://www.w3.org/History/1989/proposal.html
Gopher has all the qualities he was talking about. Gopher was a different kind of World Wide Web. We decided against that particular route, and for mostly good reasons, IMO.