Or, how much information still needs to be retrieved via these methods, now that the WWW/HTTP appears to have taken over?
Unfortunely, they’re dead as far as real world use goes. It’s a shame because I remember using gopher and liking it.
On an up note, the other month I noticed a gopher client and server listed on freshmeat (a place that lists mainly Linux/Unix software). I might just install it on my house network to play with.
There are still some gopher servers out there. Mozilla, NS6 and I think IE can follow gopher urls. Try: gopher://gopher.floodgap.com/