Respect your elders.
Gopher is today, quite clearly a thing of the past, even if there still seem to
be some true believers who long for a return to the simplicity
of menu based systems. Although the victory of the web over other systems of dissemination
and retrieval of information was already complete many years ago, information
about Gopher can still be found (on the web, of course):
Gopher is a protocol system, which in advance of the World Wide Web, allowed server based text files to be hierarchically organised and easily viewed by end users who accessed the server using Gopher applications on remote computers. Initially Gopher browsers could only display text-based files before developments such as HyperGopher, which were able to handle simple graphic formats though they were never used on a widespread basis as by this time the World Wide Web and its Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) were gaining in popularity, and had similar and more extensive functions.
And there are still some who, just as I bemoan the retreat from the web's associative
"structure", bemoan the ascendance of the web over other transfer protocols.
The first paragraph of Who
Killed Gopher reads:
As best our forensics team can reconstruct, a serial killer first surfaced in the beginning of 1991, born of an academic's midnight hack gone awry. NeXTstep users, you see -- precisely the kind of object-oriented revolutionaries that would think they could get away with inventing a brand new protocol for a mature Internet.
Gopher certainly deserves a prominent spot in the pantheon of internet history,
but I'm not sure we should be crying over its demise.
Go to: Dr. Hierarchy and Mr. Associative