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.
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.
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.
Cool replies so far. Thanks for the info.
What I meant by gopher client, is I went to 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.