WEBBITS explains the Internet:
What is Gopher?

The term "Gopher" is applied to several components of Gopher  -  the network protocol, the server type, and also the application program that is used on the personal computer to access this information.  Gopher is really a document retrieval system.

Gopher is more efficient protocol to use on the network than other protocols such as FTP and Telnet, because once you connect to a Gopher server site and get the data, the connection is closed immediately, whereas with FTP and Telnet you tie up a logical port on the host system, which prevents other users from connecting on that port.

A Gopher is a short-tailed burrowing mammal that lives in North America.  The name Gopher comes from the school mascot of the University of Minnesota, where Gopher was developed. It's also a play on the expression "I'm a Gofer, I go fer this, I go fer that!"

You don't need to know where something is stored to find it.  Once you connect to any Gopher server site, the references from there may take you to computers at Gopher server sites anywhere else in the world.

To access Gopher you will need a program that can talk to Gopher server sites.  It may be a separate program, or it can be one of the features built into your Web Browser.  Both Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator can handle the Gopher protocol, or you can use a separate program like WSGopher.

The information in Gopher is always presented in a standard format which looks like a directory listing.  Choosing a directory (or "folder") may then take you to other directories, and finally to a list of documents.  These documents usually contain information in text mode only, because Gopher existed before Web Browsers introduced the graphical presentation.  You can thus use Gopher to access information on the Internet using older computers which cannot run Windows.

Notice that when you use a Web Browser to reference a Gopher site, menus are indicated using a folder icon, whereas documents use a document icon. Other icons can be used to indicate the type of document, such as a speaker symbol to indicate a sound file, and a film symbol to indicate a movie.  Here are some of the icons used to represent the different kinds of Gopher objects:

Menu   Text File   Binary File   Movie File   Sound File   Image File   Unknown Item   Index Search   Telnet Site

With Gopher you can find information on everything from cooking, to information on countries in the world, to the Complete Works of Shakespeare. It's all in GopherSpace, and can all be accessed by using Gopher.

Here are some gopher server sites that you can look up:

University of Minnesota: Louisiana Tech University:        Carlton University in Ottawa:

gopher://gopher.micro.umn.edu/ gopher://info.latech.edu/ gopher://gopher.ncf.carleton.ca:70/1