Gopher
A popular distributed document
retrieval system which started as a {Campus Wide Information
System} at the {University of Minnesota}. Many {host}s on the
{Internet} now run Gopher servers which provide a menu of
documents. A document may be a plain text file, sound, image,
submenu or other {Gopher object type}. It may be stored on
another host or may provide the ability to search through
certain files for a given string.
Gopher is defined in {RFC 1436}.
To access Gopher you need a {Gopher client}. Next you need to
know the name of a gopher {server}. A good place to start is
gopher.micro.umn.edu {(gopher://gopher.micro.umn.edu/)}.
The latest releases of gopher software (including {client}
software) are available via {anonymous FTP} from
boombox.micro.umn.edu in the /pub/gopher directory
{(ftp://boombox.micro.umn.edu/pub/gopher)}.
Gopher has been largely superceded by the {World-Wide Web}
(WWW), a similar document retrieval system which includes
access to Gopher documents as one of its {access schemes}.
(1995-05-07)