# What Is Gopher (Internet)

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-gopher-internet/624284>\
**Category:** Factual Questions\
**Created:** [June 6, 2012, 4:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-gopher-internet/624284 "2012-06-06T16:06:48Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 4\
**Page:** 2

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**Author:** ![panamajack](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/47e85d/32.png) [@panamajack](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/panamajack)\
**Post date:** [June 7, 2012, 6:04am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-gopher-internet/624284/21 "2012-06-07T06:04:24Z")

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> [@Derleth](#):
>
> 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…

The Web was not brand-new when Mosiac was released; at least no more brand-new than Gopher. Both date to roughly 1991 for public use, and work on the WWW goes back to 1989 or so. I don’t know how early Gopher’s origins were. It is true that it was more popular than the WWW before Mosaic was released.

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**Author:** ![rat\_avatar](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/rat_avatar/32/255_2.png) [@rat\_avatar](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/rat_avatar)\
**Post date:** [June 7, 2012, 6:05am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-gopher-internet/624284/22 "2012-06-07T06:05:10Z")

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And to be picky, FTP clients with search were not using FTP as a protocol for search, unless it was to transfer a file to process locally. Gopher provided native server side search and also had the ability to “hyperlink” to remote systems.

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**Author:** ![rat\_avatar](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/rat_avatar/32/255_2.png) [@rat\_avatar](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/rat_avatar)\
**Post date:** [June 7, 2012, 6:11am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-gopher-internet/624284/23 "2012-06-07T06:11:36Z")

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> [@panamajack](#):
>
> The Web was not brand-new when Mosiac was released; at least no more brand-new than Gopher. Both date to roughly 1991 for public use, and work on the WWW goes back to 1989 or so. I don’t know how early Gopher’s origins were. It is true that it was more popular than the WWW before Mosaic was released.

At least in my experience, I had to wait until I had a SLIP account, or a TCP/IP connection to the internet to use the web.

Before that my dial in to the University was through a terminal emulator and they did not offer a web client.

Gopher was purposefully made usable as a resource if your shell had a telnet client.

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**Author:** ![AndyLee](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/898d66/32.png) [@AndyLee](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/AndyLee)\
**Post date:** [June 7, 2012, 5:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-gopher-internet/624284/24 "2012-06-07T17:05:29Z")

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Cool replies so far. Thanks for the info.

What I meant by gopher client, is I went to [download.com](http://download.com) and they had a free applicaton to access gohper sites and I couldn’t get it to work. I know some older browsers used to access gopher.

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