I looked it up on Wikipedia
It seems that it was a way to access text documents from one computer to another before the world wide web allowed pictures.
Looking at the Wikipedia article I tried to DL a client to read them, but I can’t get it working right.
So I thought I’d ask here for tips using Gopher. Is there anything left to see? Any info you would care to share I’d appreciate it.
Pretty much. Although Gopher predates HTTP by a little bit.
What doesn’t work?
Not really. There’s maybe a half dozen Gopher sites still sitting around because the cleaning lady hasn’t tripped over the power cable yet. I doubt you’d find anything interesting on them.
I think a regular browser will be able to access Gopher sites, if there are any still around. [No, scratch that, according to Wikipedia, none of the current major browsers does so natively, although it seems that there is a Firefox addon.] Certainly, back in the early days of the web, Netscape could access Gopher sites. The hard part will be finding any Gopher servers.
Gopher was simply a text based menu system. Anything you could do with Gopher you could do as well, or better, with HTML, plus a whole lot more that Gopher could never do. There really were zero advantages to keeping it around after HTML was developed. (although Gopher itself was a fairly big advance in convenience over what people had to do before to access stuff on the Net, such as using Archie and FTP).
Despite that, according to Wikipedia, the number of Gopher servers out there has risen from a low of about 100 in 2007 to 160 now. It seems to be a nostalgia thing. (As some one who once used it, I don’t get the attraction.)
There’s a gopher proxy server here. Mentioned on that page are also a number of gopher plugins for various browsers (all named some variant of Overbite).
Well, HTML is kind of useless until you have a browser! I for one recall using Gopher to download the first couple of copies of Mosaic that I installed. I think I may have had to first download the Gopher client via FTP…don’t actually recall doing that though.
I’m imagining various vinyl collectors using Gopher to keep track of their Victrola platters. 
IIRC, Gopher could read HTML files. At least HTML as it was circa 2004. I used to use it from work to websurf so if the boss came up it would look like I was coding in a terminal.
Simplicio, you’re probably thinking of Lynx, not Gopher. Lynx is a browser; Gopher is a protocol.
Ah your right. I got my antiquated, animal named networking programs muddled. They should’ve named more of them after muppets to avoid confusion
One of these days, someone is going to hit the internet way-back switch and you’ll wish you still had Gopher to kick around.
Imagine the Internet if it was entirely text-based and every single page was nothing but a bulleted list of other pages on that same server, and there was no search function, and everything was anime porn, bomb recipes, and CS400 course materials. That was Gopher.
I admit I don’t see the purpose of Gopher in a world that already had FTP.
It was menu-driven. With FTP you’d have to list out all the directories, choose the one you wanted, change into it, and list the contents of that subdirectory. Arguably, the real advantage of Gopher was that it tended to force people to curate the content into a more coherent tree structure of fewer nodes per level. Arguably. Then came hypertext, and the structure didn’t really matter anymore.
You had CS400 course materials? Luxury! We had to cobble together our own course materials out of ASCII art! And we liked it!
Well yes, but not for my university, and it was all written in Flemish.
I’m remembering the Info-Mac Digest. We got an email that listed all the newly submitted files and gave the FTP path to each.
And you could open a text file in any major directory and read a comprehensive listing of what was in the archives.
Seems like as long as you upload a table of contents sort of text file, FTP would be sufficient.
The main selling point for Mosaic and other early web browsers was that they could access everything on the Internet, from Gopher (which was fairly popular for a while), to email, to the brand-new Web protocol, from one graphical interface. (Or one textual interface, if you used Lynx.) One side-effect of this is that people began to send HTML documents over all of the protocols their browsers spoke, including in contexts where it’s frankly more trouble than it’s worth, like email. So Gopher sites can be just as friendly and advanced as websites, but, in practice, people running Gopher sites now do it because they want to run them in the simple old-fashioned Gopher model.
So, AHunter3, you could make FTP sites as friendly as HTTP sites, but you’d waste a lot of resources on the inherent crappiness of FTP as a protocol, which you cannot fix without making something that isn’t FTP.
FTP also has a limit of not allowing search features inside the client.
With Gopher you could search resources and see links to them within the gopher client without exiting the FTP client and telneting to an archie server.
Not necessarily, although modern dedicated FTP clients don’t have search features.
OK let us be more exact Server Side Search.
I guess some FTP clients would grep through archie files.