Gopher

  • Gopher system was released in mid-1991 by Mark P. McCahill team in USA.
  • The name was coined by Anklesaria due to several meanings of the word “gopher” i.e. gofer is an assistant who “goes for” things, and a gopher a North American burrowing animal that burrows through the ground to reach a desired location.
  • The Gopher protocol is still in use(but at very small level) by enthusiasts, and although it has been almost entirely supplanted by the Web.
  • It is believed that the Internet’s first data/file access protocols to run on top of a TCP/IP network.
  • Gopher is an Internet application/service that allows users to browse many different kinds of resources available on internet by looking at menus or listings of information available.
  • Gopher requires that files be stored in a menu-style hierarchy on a Gopher server that is accessible through a Gopher-enabled client browser and/or directly.
  • Gopher initially supported only text-based file/document access but later came to support some image formats such as GIF and JPEG also. 
  • Gopher is an application layer communication protocol and specifically designed for distributing, searching, and retrieving documents on internet at one place easily.
  • Gopher protocol has the ability to extract and view Web documents stored on remote Gopher Web servers.
  • Gopher was presented as alternative to the World Wide Web(www) in its early stages because www was in its infancy in 1991.
  • Gopher stores/displays the documents or contents or files in hierarchical manner that would be familiar to users, having a simple syntax, created quickly & inexpensive, gives the searched contents with additional information [such as  WAIS, the Archie and Veronica(a search engine), and gateways to other information systems such as File Transfer Protocol (FTP) and Usenet] ease of setup of Gopher servers.
  • Gopher was succeeded by the HTTP protocol and now has very few implementations.
  • Gopher-based databases, servers or websites can be accessed through two search engines mainly : Veronica and Jughead.
  • A Gopher system consists of a series of hierarchical hyperlinkable menus. The choice of menu items and titles is controlled by the administrator of the server.
  • Every Gopher document has a defined format and type, and the typical user navigates through a single server-defined menu system to get to a particular document.

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