Gopher was once one of the competitiors to provide what the web provides now: Information arranged in pages with the ability to easily navigate between them. But the University of Minnesota, the organization that invented the protocol, wouldn’t make it open to others. You had to pay royalties to UMinn if you wanted to develop gopher software. That went over like a pregnant pole-vaulter. Gopher is now dead, and the web is the undisputed king of hypertext media.